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RULING IDEAS OF THE 
PRESENT AGE 



BY 



y 



WASHINGTON GLADDEN 



MAN," " WHO WROTE THE BIBLE," ETC. 







BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

(f be 0itJer?ibe J^re??, CambriD^e 
1895 



-^ 



2,* 



Copyright, 1895, 
By WASHINGTON GLADDEN. 



All rights reserved. 




The Riverside Press^ Cambridge^ Mass., U. S. A. 
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co. 



PREFACE. 

By the will of the Hon. Richard Fletcher, 
a fund was committed to the trustees of 
Dartmouth College, the income of which 
was to be expended in obtaining and pub- 
lishing, once in two years, a prize essay 
whose purpose it should be to impress on 
the minds of all Christians '' a solemn sense 
of their duty to exhibit in their godly lives 
and conversation the heneficent effects of the 
religion they profess^ and thus increase 
the efficiency of Christianity in Christian 
countries^ and recommend its acceptance to 
the heathen nations of the world.''^ 

In accordance with this provision the 
trustees asked for essays, in the year 1894, 
upon the question : " In what ways ought 
the conception of personal life and duty to 
he modified? " The essay which follows is 
the one to which the prize was awarded. 



IV PBEFACE. 

The title given to the volume was sug- 
gested, as most readers will know, by Canon 
Mozley's " Kuling Ideas in Early Ages." 
Not only is it needful to interpret the 
thought of past ages to the men of the 
present day, it seems also necessary to 
interpret the present to itself. The regu- 
lative truths which are working themselves 
out in the experience of every generation 
are often but imperfectly articulate, and it 
is a good service if one can help his neigh- 
bors to discern the meaning of the intellec- 
tual and ethical movements that are going 
on around them. This essay is a humble 
attempt at such an interpretation. It is 
not assumed that all the ruling ideas of 
the present age are here defined ; but it is 
hoped that some of the more important 
among them have been pointed out. 

W. G. 

First Congregational Church, 
Columbus, O., October 4, 1895. 



CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

I. Change your Minds 1 

n. The Doctrine of Fatherhood .... 17 

III. The Doctrine of Brotherhood ... 31 

IV. The One and the Many '61 

Y. The Sacred and the Secular .... 97 

VI. The Law of Property 135 

VII. Religion and Politics 163 

VIII. Public Opinion 189 

IX. Pharisaism 217 



X. One but Twain 24/ 



XI. Ruling Ideas 271 



CHANGE YOUR MINDS, 



Redemption must be wrought out, and is being wrought 
out, by living, present principles finding their way into 
the thoughts, hearts, actions of men. Redemption is an 
organic process, going on at this very time, and is to be 
judged in its own nature without passing beyond the 
hour. — John Bascom, The Words of Christy Introduc- 
tion. 

Men are ruled by ideas : the military impulse is but 
an idea ; and they may therefore be ruled by increas- 
ingly noble and just ideas. If the convictions and feel- 
ings incident to goodwill can be made forceful in their 
thoughts, all external expressions will conform to them, 
and conform to them with wonderful rapidity. Here, 
then, in ideas, is the truly constructive centre of human 
society. He only builds for the future who establishes, 
intensifies, and purifies the appropriate ideas. — Ibid., 
pages 38, 39. 

A ray of heavenly light traversing human life, the 
message of Christ has been broken into a thousand rain- 
bow colors and carried in a thousand directions. It is 
the historical task of Christianity to assume with every 
age a fresh metamorphosis, and to be forever spiritualiz- 
ing more and more her understanding of the Christ and 
of salvation. — Amiel's Journal^ page 3. 



RULING IDEAS OP THE 
PRESENT AGE. 



I. 

CHANGE YOUR MINDS. 

The first words of that Porerunner who 
came preaching in the wilderness of Judea 
were these : " Change your minds, for the 
kingdom of heaven is at hand." The com- 
ing of that kingdom is always a call to men 
to change their minds. A new conception 
of life and duty is the condition of entrance 

into the kingdom. We must be trans- 
it 

formed before we can be naturalized ; but 
we are transformed by the renewing of our 
minds, by getting new ideas of life and 
duty. The feelings, the choices, the habits, 
are also changed, but the foundation of it 
all is a new conception of the meaning of 
life. 



4 CHANGE YOUR MINDS. 

The kingdom of heaven came, in the days 
of John the Baptist, only to those who 
changed their minds, and adopted its rul- 
ing principles as the law of their life. Just 
as fast and as far as the fundamental ideas 
of that kingdom were appropriated by men 
were its boundaries widened and its empire 
confirmed. The seat of this government is 
in candid minds and consenting wills. " The 
kingdom of God is within you." 

This kingdom was coming while John 
was preaching in the wilderness, and while 
Jesus was speaking on the Mount of the 
Beatitudes, And ever since then the disci- 
ples of Christ have been offering the prayer, 
" Thy kingdom come." The prayer is an- 
swered, century by century and day by day. 
The kingdom does come. It continues to 
come, in stronger force, with wider sway, 
as the years go on. But how? Only as 
men change their minds, and give it freer 
entrance to their lives and larger authority 
over them. 

The men who heard John speak changed 



CHANGE YOUR MINDS. 6 

their minds about some things, and the 
kingdom of heaven came, in some partial 
measure, to them. They changed their 
minds about the sufficiency of the Jewish 
ritual. They saw that the formalities of the 
ceremonial worship were not enough ; that 
they must do works meet for repentance. 
Religion, they had come to apprehend, was 
not a matter of form, but a matter of con- 
duct. When this change in their habitual 
thinking had taken place, the kingdom of 
heaven had come to them with a measure of 
power ; it had occupied a large area of their 
thought. 

But there were wide spaces yet unsub- 
dued to the obedience of the perfect law of 
liberty. The kingdom of heaven comes into 
every man's life very much as Israel came to 
Canaan : it enters in and intrenches itself. 
But there is still much land to be occupied ; 
there are hostile tribes in many strong- 
holds ; there must be a great deal of active 
campaigning before the whole territory is 
subdued. The kingdom has come, but its 



6 CHANGE YOUB MINDS, 

sway must be confirmed and extended. It 
has not yet fully come. The prayer that 
our Lord taught us never loses its meaning. 
And therefore those disciples of John needed 
every day to hear the same injunction, — 
" Change your minds, for the kingdom of 
heaven is at hand." "You have gained 
some new conceptions of life and duty," — 
we can imagine the Baptist saying to them, 
— "by means of which the kingdom has 
drawn near to you, and taken possession of 
some portion of your life; but there are 
many other changes which will need to be 
made from time to time, in your habitual 
thinking, in order that the kingdom may be 
more fully established in your life. You 
will need to change your minds about the 
King himself, to whom I have borne wit- 
ness ; for your first thought of his king- 
dom will be altogether inadequate. When 
you get rid of your crude ideas about him, 
and perceive that the Messiah is not to be 
a temporal king, then the kingdom of God 
will have come nearer to you. Thus, year 



CHANGE YOUE MINDS. 1 

by year, you will be changing your minds ; 
old thoughts about God and his Son and 
his Church and his Word will be passing 
away ; new views, new meanings, new inter- 
pretations, will displace the old ; you will 
constantly be renewed in the spirit of your 
minds. And thus, with these larger and 
more perfect conceptions of the truth as it 
is in Jesus, the kingdom of God will come 
to you with ever-increasing power ; you will 
be able to apprehend wdth all saints what 
is the breadth and length and height and 
depth of the love of Christ, that you may 
be filled with the fullness of God." 

All through those early days, the disci- 
ples were constantly getting new ideas, — 
revising their theories about Christ and his 
kingdom, throwing overboard their old no- 
tions and taking in a new stock of work- 
ing theories. On that night, after the cru- 
cifixion, when the eleven, and those that 
were with them, heartsick and despairing, saw 
Jesus standing in the midst of them, and 
heard him saying, " Peace be unto you ! " 



I 



8 CHANGE YOUR MINDS. 

a new conception entered into their minds, 
— - a conception which revolutionized their 
lives. Another such new idea came with a 
shock on the day of Pentecost ; another, in 
a different way, but no less effective, when 
the first council gathered in Jerusalem, and 
Paul and Barnabas showed the church how 
God had opened the door of faith unto the 
Gentiles. It was in a very imperfect and 
partial way that the kingdom of heaven 
came, at first, even to the twelve apostles. 
It was a good while before it got full pos- 
session of them ; they had to change their 
minds over and over to make room for it. 
This fact appears in their writings. 

"A comparison of the various types of 
New Testament doctrine shows us further 
that the Christian idea is there presented to 
us in various stages of development. The 
speeches of St. Peter recorded in the earlier 
chapters of the Acts of the Apostles repre- 
sent a more primitive type than we see in 
the first Epistle ascribed to that apostle. 
The Epistle of St. James is elementary in its 



CHANGE YOUB MINDS. 9 

treatment of the Christian life and truth, 
while in St. Paul's Epistles we have a rich 
elaboration of the doctrine. St. Paul him- 
self shows an advance from the comparative 
simplicity of what he wrote to the Thessa- 
lonians to the profound ideas of the Epistle 
to the Romans, and again a further advance, 
especially in Christology, in the Epistle to 
the Colossians. In St. John we not only 
have a choice and characteristic type of 
Christian doctrine : it is evident that we 
have also a later development. We are 
quite accustomed to this representation of 
progress in revelation ; we see that it is 
in harmony with the divine method in na- 
ture : but still we may be slow to perceive 
what it involves. Different stages of prog- 
ress, viewed side by side, necessarily present 
divergent aspects ; sometimes they appear to 
be quite contradictory. Progress is not a 
smooth movement ; it involves a struggle for 
existence and the survival of the fittest, — 
repudiation of the old, and painful assimi- 



10 CHANGE YOUB MINDS. 

lation of the new. The garment is rent; 
the wine-skin is burst." ^ 

We are not concerned to deny that the 
progress through which these early disci- 
ples were passing was something other and 
deeper than a mere change of opinions. The 
Spirit of truth who had come to abide with 
them is also the Spirit of purity, of gentle- 
ness, of patience, of charity ; they were all 
the while growing in grace, as well as in 
the knowledge of the truth. But the fact 
cannot be concealed that the intellectual 
changes through which they were passing 
were many and momentous : there never has 
been a time in the history of the church 
when the followers of Christ were changing 
their minds so rapidly and so radically as 
at this time. This is only saying that there 
never was another time when the mind of 
the church was so thoroughly alive. 

There are many who seem to suppose that 
the approach of the kingdom of heaven in- 

^ Faith and Criticism : Essays by Congregationalists, 
pp. 70, 71. 



CHANGE YOUB MINDS. 11 

duces a stationary mental condition among 
men ; or that if, upon this advent, any 
change occurs in intellectual conceptions, it 
is once for all ; that the minds of those who 
are brought under this sway become fixed in 
a certain set of notions, and that it is a mark 
of disloyalty if any sign of an inquiring dis- 
position appears. That this would be con- 
trary to all the analogies of nature is evi- 
dent enough. Life, in every one of its 
forms, produces constant changes : " Behold, 
I make all things new," is its word of power. 
And Paul seems to say that this law of 
change is the law of the spiritual life : "If 
any man be in Christ, he is a new creature ; 
the old things are passed away ; behold, they 
are become new." Though the outward man 
may be decaying, he tells us, " the inward 
man is renewed day hy day.^'' What is the 
inward man ? Does the term designate only 
the sentiments, the feelings? I suppose 
that we have no right to put this narrow 
construction upon it. The work of renewal 
is intellectual as well as emotional. The 



12 CHANGE YOUR MINDS, 

new hopes and loves spring from new 
thoughts, new aspects of life, new concep- 
tions of duty. The attempt to keep one 
part of the inward man in bandages while 
the other parts are allowed to grow must 
result in deformity and feebleness. It would 
be easy to predict the result, even if we had 
not before our eyes so many illustrations of 
its fatal character. 

It is evident, then, that new conceptions 
of Christian life and duty must always be 
in order. The substance of the Christian 
experience is permanent, but its forms are 
always changing ; its manifestations, like the 
grace from which they spring, are new every 
morning and fresh every evening. Loyalty 
to Christ, confidence in his word, readiness 
to know and do his will, — these are change- 
less principles of the Christian character ; 
but the question how I can best manifest 
this loyalty, by what message spoken, by 
what obedience rendered, is a question for 
every day. " New occasions teach new du- 
ties," and every new duty is the expression 



CHANGE YOUR MINDS. 13 

in concrete form of a new truth, — the em- 
bodiment in act of a new conception of life. 
The truth must not be overlooked that, 
while the kingdom of heaven can only come 
to those who accept the new conceptions in 
which its meaning and power are conveyed, 
yet it is the presence of this kingdom which 
awakens these thoughts. The apparent con- 
tradiction is only the law of reciprocity 
which we encounter whenever we deal with 
the phenomena of life. It is the moisture 
of the earth that attracts the showers, and it 
is the showers that water the earth. Upon 
the desert no rain falls, and because no rain 
falls there it is a desert. Some things stand 
related to each other so reciprocally that 
each is both the cause and the effect of the 
other. The summer brings life to the tribes 
of earth, and the tribes of earth lead in the 
summer. The seed produces the plant and 
the plant produces the seed. What we 
have said, therefore, respecting new concep- 
tions of truth as conditioning the progress 
of the kingdom does not conflict with the af- 



14 CHANGE YOUR MINDS. 

firmation that it is the progress of the king- 
dom which gives rise to these new conceptions 
of truth. It was the growth of Christianity 
which forced upon the council at Jerusalem 
the truth that the Gentiles were fellow-heirs, 
and the wider acceptance of that truth sped 
the progress of Christianity. It is the in- 
crease of Christian love — what Mr. Kidd 
calls the accumulation of a great fund of 
altruistic feeling — that has compelled the 
adoption of a new philosophy of society, and 
the adoption of that philosophy promotes 
the growth of altruistic feeling. The whole- 
some changes that have taken place in the 
dogmas of the church have generally been 
the response to a purified and heightened 
ethical sentiment. It was because the 
kingdom of God was coming with increas- 
ing power that men were compelled to 
change their minds about witchcraft, and 
about the damnation of non-elect infants, 
and about a good many other horrible doc- 
trines. And, conversely, the putting away 
of these dreadful notions from their minds 



CHANGE YOUR MINDS. 15 

has cleared the way for the coming of the 
kingdom of God. 

The presence of the moral and spiritual 
forces by which the kingdom is revealed 
must, therefore, be signalized by many 
changes in men's conceptions of truth and 
duty. The larger life will call for ampler 
theories ; the better practice will demand a 
better philosophy. It is the belief of the 
writer of these chapters that the kingdom 
of heaven is coming among men at this time 
with great power, and that therefore there 
is a loud call to men to change their minds. 
I am not denying, mark, that other changes 
than t*hose of an intellectual nature are de- 
manded ; the need of a radical change in 
the ruling love and in the habitual conduct 
is not even questioned ; but it is the object 
of this book to point out some of the changes 
in men's thinking which the present condi- 
tions of Christian society most clearly in- 
dicate. All of these changes are now in 
progress. Some minds have already passed 
through them. The new truth has been 



16 CHANGE YOUB MINDS. 

welcomed by these disciples, and the way of 
the kingdom into their lives has been pre- 
pared. No novelty will, therefore, be pre- 
sented here. I shall only point out cer- 
tain existing tendencies of thought which, 
as it seems to me, ought more and more to 
prevail, — certain ideas, already influential 
over many minds, which, when they are gen- 
erally accepted, will greatly accelerate the 
progress of the kingdom. 



II. 

THE DOCTRINE OF FATHERHOOD. 



Of the first man the scriptural idea is that he was cre- 
ated in the image of God : '* So God created man in his 
own image, in the image of God created He him." This, if 
we connect with it the immediately following endowment 
of dominion over the earth, is the highest, the grandest, 
the most inspiring and ennobling idea and description of 
man ever given. There is in it essentially the idea of son- 
ship, and so of the fatherhood of God. In its fullness 
this was first reached by Christ, but it was the scriptural 
idea from the beginning. Without the image there is 
no sonship. With it we have all that is implied in that, 
though the depth and fullness of the love of God as a Fa- 
ther could never have been apprehended except through 
Christ. — Makk Hopkins, The Scriptural Idea of Man, 
page 1. 

Take all in a word : the truth in God's breast 
Sits trace for trace upon ours impressed ; 
Though He is so bright and we so dim, 
We are made in his image to witness Him. 

Robert Browning, Christmas Eve, 

Upon the race and upon the individual Jesus is always 
bringing into more and more perfect revelation the cer- 
tain truth that man, and every man, is the child of God. 
This is the sum of the work of the Incarnation. A hun- 
dred other statements regarding it, regarding Him who 
was incarnate, are true ; but all statements concerning 
Him hold their truth within this truth, — that Jesus 
came to restore the fact of God's fatherhood to man's 
knowledge, and to its central place of power over man's 
life. — Phillips Brooks, The Influence of Jesus, page 
12. 



II. 

THE DOCTRINE OF FATHERHOOD. 

The relation of man to God is a subject 
concerning whicli there is need of clearer 
ideas. The doctrine of the Divine Father- 
hood has long been regarded as fundamen- 
tal in theology ; it lies so palpably upon the 
face of the New Testament that it could 
hardly be avoided ; but the qualifications 
and limitations with which it has been held 
have greatly reduced its significance. Theo- 
retically, God has been confessed to be the 
Father of men ; but it has been assumed 
that, after all, it is only with the regenerate 
that any parental relations are maintained. 
The child, it seems to be supposed, has the 
power of annulling the fact of the father- 
hood. This breach having been made, the 
real relation is no longer that of Father and 
child, but that of strangers and aliens ; and 



20 THE DOCTRINE OF FATHERHOOD. 

none of the benefits of the fatherhood are 
within reach of the child until a change in 
his status has somehow taken place. You 
must tell men that God is their Father, but 
you must be very careful not to let them 
get the idea that they are his children. 
The conception is difficult to entertain, but 
there is force enough in it greatly to sophis- 
ticate the ideas of men respecting the deep- 
est fact of their lives. 

Some of us who are fathers find it hard 
to understand how a child can annul the 
fact of fatherhood. It does not appear to 
be a matter over which the will of the father 
or the will of the child can have any control. 
The relation is not contractual, and so termi- 
nable by the choice of either party or of 
both parties ; it is natural and unrepealable. 
He who is bone of my bone and flesh of my 
flesh cannot be other than my child, no mat- 
ter what his wish or mine may be ; no mat- 
ter what the laws may say ; no matter what 
crimes he may commit, or by what enor- 
mities he may outrage my fatherly feelingo 



THE DOCTRINE OF FATHERHOOD. 21 

While he lives, and while I live, that rela- 
tion will subsist. Nor can I understand 
how there could ever be any willingness on 
the part of a true father that the relation 
should be terminated. The obligations of 
fatherhood are not affected by the child's 
misconduct. The more disobedient and the 
more ungrateful he is, the stronger are the 
reasons why I should seek to save him. 
The time may come when I shall feel help- 
less to do anything for him ; when my very 
love will forbid me to offer him relief and 
succor ; when I shall see that the best medi- 
cine for him will be the fruit of his own 
doings : but there can never be a moment, 
in any world, when the heart of the father 
will not spring to help and save a child who 
is willing to be helped and saved. If we, 
being evil, cannot eradicate from our hearts 
parental instincts and obligations, how much 
less can the Father in heaven ignore or deny 
his fatherhood ! 

There need be no shrinking, then, from 
the clear affirmation that God is the Father 



22 THE DOCTRINE OF FATHERHOOD. 

of US all; and, having said this, we need 
not stultify ourselves by going on to deny 
that we are all his children. The distinc- 
tion which theology has labored to make 
cannot be made by the human reason. The 
fact of the Divine Fatherhood, in all its full- 
ness, with all its natural implications, must 
be distinctly declared. If it is true, it is 
the greatest truth of which any man can 
think, and we must not suffer it to be con- 
fused or belittled. To make every man see 
that, not according to some legal fiction, — 
not as the result of some possible pact or 
concession, — but according to the immedi- 
ate and the everlasting fact, he is a child of 
God, made in the divine image, with all 
the possibilities and all the responsibilities 
of the sons of God resting now upon his 
conscience, is to bring the strongest possi- 
ble motive to bear upon his life. 

If he is living unworthily, if he is exposed 
to mortal peril, these facts need not be con- 
cealed, they may be all the more cogently 
asserted. The very misery and shame of 



THE DOCTRINE OF FATHERHOOD. 23 

his condition is this, that, being a child of 
God, he is where he is. The child cannot 
annul the fact of his paternity, but he can 
dishonor his Father and destroy himself. 
Fatherhood is not, alas ! a barrier against 
ruin. The prodigal can spurn his Father's 
love and go into the far country, and can stay 
there, despite his Father's love, and perish 
there. But all the while he is his Father's 
child ; it is the one truth that needs to be 
brought home to him : if anything can rouse 
him and reclaim him, it will be the recogni- 
tion of this truth. 

Another corollary of this truth is of vast 
moment. It means that goodness, the most 
glorious and perfect goodness, is, in the 
deepest sense of the word, natural to man. 
Evil may have become a second nature to 
him, but the evil impulses and tendencies 
are not his real self. " For the good which 
I would I do not, but the evil, which I would 
not, that I practice. But if what I would 
not, that I do, it is no more I that do it, but 
sin which dwelleth in me." The evil nature 



24 THE DOCTRINE OF FATHEBHOOD. 

is not I ; it is a false, an artificial self, which 
has usurped a power over me to which I 
must not consent. I am a child of God, 
and the divine impulses and motives which 
I find in my heart are the real man. He 
who comes to be the Eevealer of God and the 
Redeemer of man comes to help me to real- 
ize myself to be a man. In the words of a 
great modern teacher : " There is no human 
affection of fatherhood, brotherhood, child- 
hood, which is not capable of expressing 
divine relations. Man is a child of God, 
for whom his Father's house is waiting. 
The whole creation is groaning and travail- 
ing till man shall be complete. Christ 
comes not to destroy but to fulfill. What 
is the spirit of such words as these ? Is it 
not all a claiming of man through all his 
life for God ? Is it not an assertion that 
just so far as he is not God's he is not 
truly man? Is it not a declaration that 
whatever he does in his true human nature, 
undistorted, unperverted, is divinely done, 
and therefore that the divine perfection of 



THE DOCTRINE OF FATHERHOOD. 25 

his life will be in the direction which these 
efforts of his nature indicate and pro- 
phesy?"! 

The clear apprehension of this truth, that 
the work of redemption is just bringing 
back man to his real self, would impart to 
our gospel in many quarters a new signifi- 
cance. ''He restoreth my soul." Is not 
this, indeed, the very thing that he came to 
do ? Salvation came to the prodigal " when 
he came to himself." Nothing better can 
be done for the most degraded outcast than 
to bring him to himself. Sin is temporary 
insanity. The mind wanders. The man is 
not himself. The restoration of clear think- 
ing, the return of the power to comprehend 
his own identity, this is the beginning of 
the better life. 

The notion that the Christian life is an 
unnatural life; that in conversion we take 
on a new and foreign selfhood; that the 
sentiments and habits of the renewed man 
are radically different from those of the 

1 The Light of the World, by Phillips Brooks, p. 7. 



26 THE DOCTRINE OF FATHEBHOOD, 

"natural" man, — all tliis grievously hin- 
ders the acceptance of our gospel, or perverts 
it, when it is accepted, into a caricature of 
itself. Much of this is due to a crass and 
unspiritual exegesis, — to the hardening of 
Pauline metaphors into philosophical dis- 
tinctions. True, that Paul contrasts the 
natural man with the spiritual man; but 
what does he mean by " the natural man " ? 
True, that in many texts the hostility of the 
unregenerate nature to God is emphasized : 
but is it the real human nature that is thus 
characterized, or that artificial, second na- 
ture which has overgrown the true human- 
ity ; is it Paul's " I myself," or Paul's " the 
law in my members " ? True, that " adop- 
tion " is spoken of as part of the work of 
salvation ; but is this adoption a necessary 
legal process through which men must pass 
before they can become the children of God, 
or is it a rhetorical figure by which is signi- 
fied the welcome of unfilial children return- 
ing to their loyalty ? Can we really assume 
it to be a fact of theological science that 



THE DOCTRINE OF FATHERHOOD. 27 

the filial relations of men to God have be- 
come so disturbed by sin that a legal pro- 
cess of restoration is necessary ? What in- 
finite confusion has been introduced into 
our thinking about God by such attempts 
to turn the language of feeling into the 
language of science I 

No ; the real gospel truth- is, that Christ 
comes to put us in possession of ourselves, — 
to help us to drive out the usurping powers 
of darkness, and to take the rights and 
dignities that belong to us as men. " Now 
are we the sons of God," and He wants us 
to know it and live up to it. "All of 
our Christian thinking and talking," says 
Bishop Brooks, "has been and is haunted 
by a certain idea of failure and recommence- 
ment. Man is a failure, so there shall be 
a new attempt ; and in place of the man we 
will make the Christian ! There is nothing 
of that tone about what Jesus says. The 
Christian to Jesus is the man. The Chris- 
tian, to all who think the thought of Jesus 
after Him, is the perfected and completed 



28 THE DOCTRINE OF FATHERHOOD. 

man. Just see what this Involves. Hear 
with what naturalness it clothes the invita- 
tions of the gospel. They are no strange 
summons to some distant unseen land ; they 
are God's call to you to be yourself. They 
appeal to a homesickness in your own heart, 
and make it their confederate. That you 
should be the thing you have been, and not 
be that better thing, that new man which is 
the oldest man, the first type and image of 
your being, is unnatural and awful. ... If 
Christ can make you know yourself ; if, as 
you walk with Him day by day. He can re- 
veal to you your sonship to the Father ; if, 
keeping daily company with Him, you can 
more and more come to know how native is 
goodness, and how unnatural sin is to the 
soul of man ; if, dwelling with Him who is 
both God and man, you can come to believe 
both in God and in man through Him, — 
then you are saved, — saved from, contempt, 
saved from despair, saved into courage and 
hope and charity, and the power to resist 



THE DOCTRINE OF FATHERHOOD. 29 

temptation, and the passionate pursuit of 
perfectness." ^ 

That this is a conception of the Christian 
life quite unlike that which has prevailed in 
most of our evangelical communions cannot, 
I think, be denied. That it is a distinctly 
higher and truer conception than those 
which have been current is scarcely de- 
batable. The appeal which it makes to 
the human heart is far more inspiring ; the 
possibilities which it sets before us more 
alluring. When this great truth gets full 
possession of the mind of the church, the 
kingdom of heaven will come with increas- 
ing power. 

1 The Light of the World, pp. 10, 22. 



III. 

THE DOCTRINE OF BROTHERHOOD. 



Now there is another part of charity, which is the ba- 
sis and pillar of this, and that is the love of God for 
whom we love our neighbor ; for this I think charity, to 
love God for himself, and our neighbor for God. All 
that is truly amiable is God, or, as it were, a divided piece 
of Him that retains a reflex or shadow of himself. Nor 
is it strange that we should place afEection on that which 
is invisible ; all we truly love is thus. What we adore 
under affection of our senses deserves not the honor of 
so pure a title. Thus we adore Virtue, though to the 
eyes of sense she be invisible. Thus that part of our 
noble friends that we love is not the part which we em- 
brace, but that invisible part which our arms cannot em- 
brace. — Sir Thomas Browne, Beligio Medici, Part II., 
sect. xiv. 

Giving is not a condescension. I must not assume that, 
because another man is poorer than I, I have a right 
to give him something. To fling him an alms may be an 
insult. A gift may serve to only degrade him. Let me 
look carefully at myself, at him, and at the gift before I 
dare bestow. Some of us have been too prone to think 
it quite proper that we should have most of the good 
things, and should bestow of our superfluity upon the 
rest of mankind, while they, duly feeling their depend- 
ence upon our bounty, are grateful. Perhaps, were the 
situation reversed, we should not be so ready to accept 
it. — Mary Emily Case, The Love of the World, page 
81. 



III. 

THE DOCTRINE OF BROTHERHOOD. 

The coming of the kiDgdom of heaven 
will be signalized and hastened by the prev- 
alence of clearer ideas respecting the bro- 
therhood of man. When the doctrine of 
the Divine Fatherhood is rightly understood, 
the conceptions of men respecting their 
relations to one another must needs be 
clarified. 

It is true, indeed, that the implications of 
this doctrine have already brought about 
mighty changes in the earth. The belief 
in the Divine Fatherhood has undermined 
feudalism and destroyed slavery and led in 
democracy. The power of this great idea it 
is, more than any or all other agencies, which 
has compelled the emancipation of the la- 
boring classes, and the establishment, in so 
many nations, of political equality. If all 



34 THE BOCTBINE OF BBOTHERHOOD. 

men are the sons of God, then it is plain 
that one man may not enslave another, nor 
oppress another, nor despise another. Some 
measure of social fellowship must also fol- 
low as the inference from this doctrine. If 
there are still differences among men, as 
among the stars, and if some liberty of 
social selection is allowed, so that those of 
kindred tastes and aptitudes consort together, 
— there is still no room left for the contempt 
of the weaker and the more ignorant ; they 
are all God's children, and respect and even 
reverence must be due to every one of them. 
" Honor all men. Love the brotherhood." 
The haughtiness and exclusiveness which the 
more fortunate sometimes exhibit towards 
their lowlier brethren can never live in any 
heart which has really comprehended the 
truth of the Divine Fatherhood. 

This doctrine of the equality of rights, 
which springs from the Christian doctrine 
of the Fatherhood of God, and which is the 
corner-stone of our modern democracy, is 
well established in the thought of the race. 



THE DOCTRINE OF BROTHERHOOD. 35 

The laws of great nations express it. The 
literature of the present century is saturated 
with it ; it may be regarded as the ruling 
idea of modern civilization. The truth is 
not yet fully realized in our political and 
social life ; vast injustices and inequalities 
are still arrayed against it ; but it has taken 
possession of the mind of Christendom, and 
its ultimate victory over every form of social 
wrong is our reasonable expectation. 

Not only with respect to political equality 
and social fraternity has the doctrine of hu- 
man brotherhood found large realization, but 
also with respect to the practice of charity. 
The immense development of philanthropy 
which has characterized the Christian era is 
due to the partial realization of this truth. 
" ' Any impartial observer,' says Mr. Lecky, 
'would describe the most distinctive virtue 
referred to in the New Testament, as love, 
charity, or philanthropy.' It is the spirit of 
charity, pity, and infinite compassion which 
breathes through the gospel. The new re- 
ligion was, at the outset, actually and with- 



36 THE DOCTRINE OF BROTHERHOOD, 

out any figurative exaggeration, what the 
same writer has called it elsewhere, — a 
proclamation of the universal brotherhood 
of man.' We note how it was this feature 
which impressed the minds of men at first. 
The noble system of ethics; the affection 
which the members bore to each other ; the 
devotion of all to the corporate welfare ; the 
spirit of inJBnite tolerance for every weakness 
and inequality ; the consequent tendency to 
the dissolution of social and class barriers 
of every kind, beginning with those between 
slave and master; and the presence every- 
where of the feeling of actual brotherhood, 
— were the outward features of all the 
early Christian societies." ^ 

This testimony indicates the close relation 
of Christianity not only to the development 
of charity, of which we are now speaking, 
but also to the development of social equal- 
ity, of which we have just spoken. But 
while it is true that the brotherhood of 
man, as taught by Christ, has been largely 

1 Social Evolution J by Benjamin Kidd, p. 148. 



THE DOCTRINE OF BROTHERHOOD. 37 

the source of the abounding philanthropies 
of the Christian era, it is also true that an 
imperfect apprehension of this doctrine has 
resulted in perverting charity, and in mak- 
ing the administration of it, in a vast num- 
ber of cases, a curse rather than a blessing 
to its recipients. Before the kingdom of 
God can fully come, a great many Christian 
people will have to change their minds con- 
cerning the true nature of charity. 

Charity has been mainly almsgiving. The 
assumption upon which it almost univer- 
sally proceeds is the superiority of the giver 
and the inferiority of the recipient. It is 
a gracious act, originating in the benignity 
of the bestower, and putting the beneficiary 
under obligation. If the giver is not proud 
and arrogant, he is at least complacent ; if 
the receiver is not humiliated, he is certainly 
disposed to be very deferential. The act of 
charity itself, as ordinarily conceived, puts 
a difference between him who gives and him 
who takes ; it raises the one to a plane 
somewhat above the other. It is probably 



38 THE DOCTRINE OF BBOTHERHOOD. 

the truth to say that a great many of those 
who give are influenced to their bounty, in 
considerable degree, by the consciousness of 
superiority which is thus awakened. The 
tip, which is a kind of alms, is more will- 
ingly bestowed because it emphasizes the 
social contrast between the giver and the 
receiver. It is pleasant to have the power 
to confer favors, and to be able to make 
others realize this power. A good part of 
the blessedness of giving, in the heart of 
many a Lady Bountiful, may be traced to 
this source. 

It is easy to see that the kind of brother- 
hood which is connoted by this subtle as- 
sumption of class distinctions is far removed 
from that true fraternity which springs from 
the clear recognition of every man as a 
child of God. When we have once compre- 
hended the true character of the human 
beings whom we are trying to befriend, we 
cannot any longer indulge ourselves in such 
an undervaluation of them as is often signi- 
fied in the looks and the words by which 



THE DOCTRINE OF BROTHERHOOD. 39 

our alms are accompanied. If they, like 
ourselves, are God's dear children, they 
must be treated with respect and reverence, 
no matter how low they may have fallen. Our 
reverence and respect is the assertion of the 
truth which they are forgetting, and which 
they must by no means be permitted to for- 
get. To treat them as though they were 
God's children is the only way to make 
some of them understand that they are his 
children. And if they are not degraded, if 
they are only unfortunate, then surely the 
air of superiority which the giver assumes 
is a palpable breach of the spirit of bro- 
therhood. 

The law of the brotherhood of man, as 
applied in our charities, requires, then, a 
genuine respect for the manhood and wo- 
manhood of all whom we are trying to help, 
— such a respect as will not for one mo- 
ment consent to see them sink at our feet 
as menials, and kiss the hand of the bene- 
factor; such a respect as will not permit 
them to cringe and fawn and flatter us. 



40 THE DOCTRINE OF BBOTHEBHOOD. 

or willingly to assume the role of humble 
pensioners upon our bounty. Relations of 
this nature do not subsist between the chil- 
dren of a common Father. The fact that 
in all Christian communities a pauper class 
exists, and that in many of them it is stead- 
ily growing, is prima facie evidence that 
the true nature of the human brotherhood 
is not understood. Beyond all controversy, 
this pauper class owes its existence, in large 
measure, to the subtle selfishness of the 
almoners of charity, who are more willing 
to bestow a dole than to give a helping 
hand. 

The fundamental error in all our charita- 
ble work is found, no doubt, in the concep- 
tion that pain or suffering is the greatest 
of evils. This assumption is fundamen- 
tal to much of our popular teaching, in the 
pulpit and out of it; and it is a false as- 
sumption. Suffering is not the greatest 
evil ; moral unworthiness is the greatest evil. 
Suffering may often be disciplinary and 
remedial; falsehood, treachery, malignity, 



THE DOCTRINE OF BROTHERHOOD. 41 

are evil and only evil. Between a willful 
choice of wrong and a severe infliction of 
pain, the pain is always to be chosen. It 
was not primarily from suffering or dis- 
comfort that Christ came to save men, but 
from sin and shame ; from meanness and 
littleness ; from the loss of the soul, which is 
the loss of character. The failure to compre- 
hend this truth has resulted in the perversion 
and corruption of the Christian religion 
through centuries of history. Because men 
conceived that Christ's main purpose was to 
save men from suffering, all their adminis- 
tration of his gospel has been misdirected, 
and they have often aggravated the very 
evils which the gospel is intended to cure. 
In preaching the gospel chiefly as the 
means of escape from the sufferings of hell 
into the blessedness of heaven, the appeal 
was steadily made to the selfishness of men. 
And in the administration of charity, not 
less than in the methods of homiletics, the 
same error was committed. If Christ came 
to relieve men from suffering, that must be 



42 THE BOCTRINE OF BROTHERHOOD. 

the duty of all Christ's followers ; and any 
case of suffering must be relieved, no matter 
at what cost to character. The question, 
how the man is to be affected by this relief 
of his immediate distress, is a question that 
whole generations of Christians have forgot- 
ten to ask. Pain, they have assumed, is the 
great evil: was it not from eternal pain 
that Christ came to save us ? and therefore 
we must get this man out of pain, no matter 
what happens to Mm. 

Coupled with this was another false notion 
which has had much to do with the perver- 
sion of charity. It has been supposed that 
Christ's purpose to relieve suffering was so 
central a part of his work of salvation that 
he was willing to count any work of that 
kind as special merit, and specially to reward 
any one who gave relief to any sufferer; so 
that he who mitigated any human woe by 
that act laid up great treasure in heaven. 
Thebestowment of alms, therefore, upon any 
one in poverty or distress was the crowning 
Christian grace ; it relieved suffering, which 



THE DOCTBINE OF BROTHERHOOD, 43 

was the chief purpose of Christ's mission, 
and it gained for the almsgiver a heavenly 
reward. Under the operation of these two 
motives, over large portions of the earth's 
surface, and for long periods, sweet charity 
has been turned into a curse. The mendi- 
cancy which has overrun Southern Europe 
is mainly due to this cause. All the hun- 
gry must be fed, all the naked must be 
clad, all beggars must receive alms, for this 
is the very substance of Christian virtue. 
What if the beggar be an impostor? You, 
at any rate, get the reward of your charity. 
If one is winning his way into heaven by his 
bounties, he must not trouble himself too 
much about their effect upon the recipients. 
Has not the Master said, " Give to him that 
asketh thee, and from him that would bor- 
row of thee turn not thou away " ? Why 
should we be scrupulous ? Is not charity a 
good thing in itself ? Out of such reasonings 
has sprung the beggary of Italy, of France, 
of Spain, of Ireland. The Spanish beggars 
get the point, and put it sharply in their 



44 THE BOCTRINE OF BBOTHERHOOD. 

habitual supplication, " Be good to your- 
self ! " They will not allow you to forget 
that your almsgiving is in large measure a 
scheme to benefit yourself. 

Notions similar to these vitiate a great 
deal of our own thought about charity. If 
there is not so much reference among us to 
the gains which we hope to get from our 
alms, there is constant assumption that the 
relief of suffering and want is always meri- 
torious ; that the Christian must, because he 
is a Christian, relieve every case of suffer- 
ing and want that comes within his notice, 
immediately and without regard to any ul- 
terior consequences ; that the refusal to do 
this in any case proves the man to be a 
hypocrite ; that charity is such a good thing 
that there cannot possibly be too much of 
it ; that the best Christian is the man who 
gives most and asks no questions ; that 
what happens to those who receive what is 
given is a matter of small consequence. 

Over against all this it is necessary to 
keep steadily before us the fact that Christ 



THE DOCTRINE OF BROTHERHOOD. 45 

did not come into this world to relieve suf- 
fering. That was not the primary purpose 
for which he came. He came to save men 
from sin. Suffering is no doubt the conse- 
quence of sin, one of its consequences, — by 
no means its worst consequence ; but Christ 
attacks the cause rather than the conse- 
quences. That he did relieve much suffering 
is true; but we must not fail to see how 
wholly subordinate was this work of physi- 
cal relief to the work of restoring character, 
of redeeming men from the power of sin. 
Always he insisted that this ministry to the 
bodies of men was but the sign and illustra- 
tion of the greater work which he had come 
to do for their souls. To care for bodily 
needs, and ignore the effect of what we are 
doing upon the manhood of the recipient, is 
a curious way of imitating Christ. 

Now, if Christ did not come primarily to 
relieve suffering, then it is not the Chris- 
tian's first business to relieve suffering. 
Suffering is not the greatest evil. Suffer- 
ing is a consequence, and not a cause ; and 



46 THE DOCTRINE OF BROTHEBHOOD. 

we often make a great mistake in trying to 
remove the consequence without touching 
the cause, — leaving the cause, indeed, ac- 
tively at work to produce more suffering. 
Much of our work of relief is at best only 
the lotion that soothes the eruption on the 
skin, while the poison in the blood is left 
to do its deadly work ; often, alas ! it is a 
lotion that adds to the virulence of the poi- 
son. The relief is momentary, the malady 
is aggravated. We must learn that suffer- 
ing is not, under all circumstances, an evil. 
It may be natural, remedial, wholesome in 
its effects. Its connection with misdoing or 
non-doing may be close and salutary; and 
it may be of the very first importance that 
the sufferer should see this connection, and 
should be convinced that it is natural and 
inevitable. I see a great deal of suffering 
which I would not lift my finger to remove. 
I do not think that it would be right for me 
to do so. The one thing, above all others, 
which these sufferers must learn, is the con- 
nection between their suffering and their 



THE DOCTRINE OF BROTHERHOOD. 47 

own misdoing. The suffering is tlie good 
ordinance of a good God, and this is the 
fact which they need to know. For me to 
step in and prevent them from learning it 
would not be a good service to them. Peo- 
ple sometimes say to me, " How can there 
be a good God ? If there were a good God 
I should not suffer so." One cannot al- 
ways tell such people the truth. One must 
not, indeed, undertake to pronounce God's 
judgments. But it seems, not seldom, to 
one who looks on with human discernment, 
that there would be very little evidence of 
the existence of a good God if some of 
these people did not suffer ; that a merciful 
Being could not let them go on destroying 
themselves without some sharp reminders 
of the danger into which they are so will- 
fully plunging. I do not deny that there 
are sufferings in this world, many and dire 
sufferings, which no human discernment can 
explain ; which we cannot, by our sharpest 
insight, connect with any known misdoing 
of the sufferers. I do not pretend to say 



48 THE BOCTEINE OF BROTHEBHOOD. 

that there are no mysteries connected with 
suffering, nor that the faith of men may 
not be sorely tried by the discipline through 
which they are called to pass. I only say 
that in many cases the relation of the suf- 
fering to the misdoing of which it is the 
consequence is clear and palpable ; that its 
beneficent uses may be clearly seen; that 
it can be relieved by the sufferer himself if 
he will cease from his misdoing; that the 
removal of his suffering by others, who 
thus permit and encourage him to go on 
with his misdoing, is a clear interference 
with the natural order, which in this case 
is working remedially and beneficently. 

These closely related misconceptions — 
first, that the relief of suffering is the deep- 
est and most imperative need of human be- 
ings, and, second, that we find in the allevia- 
tion of the sufferings of our fellow-men our 
greatest opportunity to win the applause of 
Heaven, and to secure for ourselves a high 
place among the saints — have strongly 
tended to the perversion of our charities. 



THE DOCTRINE OF BROTHERHOOD. 49 

I must not be understood as denying that 
mucli wise and benign work lias been done 
in the name of charity ; I am only saying 
that with the good a vast amount of evil 
has been mingled, and I am trying to point 
out the sources of the e\al. And you will 
always find that practical failures of this 
kind spring from false or defective ideas. 
What these defective ideas are, in the case 
before us, we have seen. And it is plain 
that they must at once be cleared away by 
a distinct recognition of the great fact of 
human brotherhood. 

If the mendicant — or the man who is 
sinking toward mendicancy — is my brother, 
child of the same Father, partaker of the 
same divine nature, heir of the same birth- 
right, character in him is just as precious as 
it is in me ; and I must choose for him, as I 
would for myself, manhood before comfort, 
freedom from shame and dishonor rather 
than relief from pain. If he is sinking be- 
low the level of manhood, that degradation 
ought to be attended with suffering; the 



60 THE DOCTRINE OF BROTHERHOOD, 

suffering is the divine admonition to arouse 
himself, and resist the downward tenden- 
cies. I must not silence that voice, I must 
call his attention to its significance ; and my 
first duty is to take him by the hand and 
help him to reascend to the safer levels 
from which he has been sinking. If I find 
a fellow-man in a quagmire, my duty is not 
to try to make him comfortable there, but 
to get him out. 

The man who asks an alms is a free 
spirit, inhabiting a body of flesh. The ma- 
terial part is deserving of care and honor, 
but only because it is, for a few years, the 
tabernacle inhabited by the spiritual part. 
The body is the handiwork of God, the 
spirit is his offspring. Surely it is the spir- 
itual rather than the physical part of man 
which is made in the divine image. When 
we say that God is the Father of us all, we 
mean that he is the Father of our spirits ; 
and therefore the brotherhood of man is 
chiefly a spiritual fact, and the law of that 
brotherhood is chiefly concerned with spir- 



THE DOCTRINE OF BROTHERHOOD, 51 

itual interests. We manifest our brother- 
hood most clearly by keeping uppermost 
the great facts of character. When, there- 
fore, my neighbor asks an alms, my ques- 
tion must be, not merely what must be the 
effect of the bestowal of the alms upon his 
physical comfort, but also and chiefly how 
it will affect his spiritual condition. Will 
it make him more or less a man if I en- 
courage him in living upon alms ? I have 
compassion for his bodily distresses, but 
should not my deepest and keenest sympa- 
thy take hold upon that part of his nature 
in which our kinship is closest ? How can 
I bear to see him sinking into an unmanly 
dependence ? 

We cannot be unmindful of bodily suf- 
fering ; we shall do what we can to relieve 
it, when anything can be done without en- 
tailing spiritual losses ; but we shall be 
far more profoundly affected by everything 
which threatens to impair the spiritual in- 
tegrity of our brother. It is the injuries 
and losses with which the man himself is 



52 THE DOCTRINE OF BBOTHEBHOOD. 

threatened that most appeal to our sym- 
pathy, — not the damage that may be done 
to the house he lives in. 

The conception of our relation to our 
brother as one which encourages us to util- 
ize his misfortunes for our own profit is 
even more abhorrent. The indulgence of 
humane and compassionate feelings is, no 
doubt, a luxury to some natures. And 
there are those who suppose that the indul- 
gence of such feelings makes up the greater 
part of human virtue. The poor and the 
suffering are mainly interesting to some 
persons because they furnish an occasion 
for the indulgence of these feelings. We 
have the poor and the suffering always with 
us, and we are therefore always supplied 
with an incentive to acts by which we may 
gratify our sensibilities, and at the same 
time greatly advance our own interests. 
They are simply objects on which we may 
practice our compassions. It is in such 
practice that we develop the saintly vir- 
tues, and gain high seats in heaven. What 



THE DOCTRINE OF BROTHERHOOD. 53 

may become 6i them is not the first concern 
with us; we are looking out for our own 
salvation. 

I am depicting this state of mind with 
rather a blunt pencil; probably very few 
persons have ever stated the case to them- 
selves in terms quite so bald and repulsive ; 
but the tendency will be recognized. And 
it is not difficult to see that such a tendency 
is the explicit contradiction of the fact of 
brotherhood. The man who flings a dole 
to a beggar, not knowing nor caring how 
much it debases him, only hoping to be 
sped thereby in his own path to heaven, is 
one who has never thought of this beggar 
as his brother. 

But has not Christ himself said, "It is 
more blessed to give than to receive " ? 
Truly he has ; and, in the words of Dr. 
Bascom, "the failure to take the highest 
social principle from the lips of Christ is 
seen in the very partial way in which it is 
applied when men first turn to it. They 
may give, but give with so little wisdom 



54 THE DOCTRINE OF BROTHERHOOD. 

and love, — give in such antagonism to 
lower principles, — as quite to lose sight 
of the idea that giving is for the develop- 
ment of power. A love that seeks virtuous 
life will be saved from this error. Giving 
which is careless giving is not true giving, 
as it lacks the giving mind and heart, and 
cannot bear, either backward or forward, 
to giver or receiver, the beneficence of a 
gift. The giving which is more blessed 
than receiving is that which pours life into 
channels of life, and draws life freshly there- 
from." 1 

This, then, is the test of our charity, — 
does it recognize between giver and receiver 
the highest bond, the bond of spiritual bro- 
therhood ; and does it seek to make the gift 
a vehicle for the communication of the di- 
vine life from the one to the other? The 
charity that does this is twice blessed. The 
charity that stuffs the cupboard and lets 
the character starve ; the charity that pros- 
trates the receiver before the giver, and 

1 Words of Christ, p. 158. 



THE DOCTRINE OF BROTHERHOOD. 65 

makes the one a stepping-stone on whicli the 
other mounts to beatitude, — is twice cursed : 
it curseth him that gives and him that takes. 

If those who ask for charity are our 
brethren, we must not wantonly or care- 
lessly contribute to their degradation. We 
must love them as we love ourselves. We 
must hate the spirit of abjectness and ser- 
vility and indolent mendicancy in them as 
we hate it in ourselves. What we know to 
be beneath the dignity of the sons of God 
in us is not to be tolerated in them. For 
them to be beggars and sponges is a sorrow 
and a disgrace to us, for they are the chil- 
dren of our Father. By some means they 
must be rescued from this fate. We must 
save them. If brotherhood means anything 
at all, it can mean no less than this. 

" There is," says a modern preacher, " I 
am thankful to believe, much kindness in 
the hearts of very many toward their poorer 
brethren ; there is abundant discussion of 
the methods by which they are to be helped. 
But there is not nearly as much kindness as 



66 THE DOCTRINE OF BROTHERHOOD. 

there ought to be in the hearts of profess- 
ing Christians : how can there be until each 
one of us is filled with the mind of Him who 
came down from heaven to suffer and die 
for his brethren ? The true compassion is 
that which longs to make each brother bet- 
ter, happier, safer, as a child of God ; no 
compassion which stops short at the tem- 
poral condition of the poor is worthy of 
them or of us, or will be effectual in reaching 
even its own ends. The pity, the goodwill, 
which deserves to be called Christian love, 
will be powerful enough to engage all the 
energies of the mind, all the resources of 
experience, in the service of the poor. 
Making us more interested, more careful, 
more anxious in that service, it would also 
restlessly impel us to give, not less but 
more. The true Christian will not dare to 
call anything that he has his own : he will 
go beyond Mr. Henry George or Mr. Hynd- 
man in confessing the claims of the great 
suffering mass of humanity, not only upon 
all that he possesses, but upon himself ; he 



THE DOCTRINE OF BROTHERHOOD. 57 

will count himself as sent into the world 
to administer whatever is intrusted to him 
to the glory of God, and therefore to the 
advantage of his fellows." ^ 

It will be evident, from these reflections, 
that the business of charity is a high and 
sacred vocation. No man can rightly ad- 
minister it who does not first clearly under- 
stand and deeply feel the dignity and di- 
vineness of human nature. No man can 
bestow charity worthily who does not know 
that he himself is a child of God, and who 
does not feel a deep sense of the sacredness 
of that relation. Unless he has, consciously 
or unconsciously, fellowship with the Father ; 
unless God's purposes for man are the rul- 
ing of his life, — he has nothing really valu- 
able to give to those in need. 

And it is equally needful that he should 
comprehend with equal clearness the truth 
that every beggar at his door is as truly 
God's child as he is, and that God's purposes 
concerning this beggar brother must be the 

1 Social Questions : by J. Llewellyn Davies, p. 286. 



68 THE DOCTRINE OF BBOTHERHOOD. 

guide of all his conduct toward him. The 
kind of ministry that the beggar has a right 
to receive from him is that which will en- 
able him to realize his manhood. Christ 
has come to help every man to recover the 
manhood he has lost, to realize the pur- 
pose for which he was created. He is the 
Elder Brother, the Captain of Salvation; 
and we follow Him in the work of forgiving 
and saving men. We know how He saved 
them : He lived among them ; He lived for 
them ; He gave his life in an untiring min- 
istry to them. He did relieve their physi- 
cal sufferings, but never without seeking to 
restore their lost manhood. To bring them 
all back to the Father, to make them see 
what manner of love He has bestowed upon 
them, and what manner of men they ought 
to be because they were children of such a 
Father, — this was the whole purpose of his 
ministry. In Him was life, and the life 
was the light of men. 

" Still," says Dr. Hodges (and he is talk- 
ing about the lad whom Jesus healed at the 



THE DOCTRINE OF BROTHERHOOD. 59 

foot of the Mount of Transfiguration), " it is 
significant that not only here but elsewhere 
Jesus got very close to the man whom he 
would help. It means something that He 
took him by the hand. He was forever 
doing that. Throughout his ministry He 
dealt with individuals, not with crowds. 
He went among the people, never holding 
himself aloof from them ; coming into per- 
sonal acquaintance with their temptations, 
bearing their sicknesses, and carrying their 
sorrows. He was called the friend of pub- 
licans and sinners. And the name was a 
true description of his ministry among 
them. He talked with them, walked with 
them, ate at their tables, knew the names 
of their little children ; He helped them, not 
so much by what He said as by what He was. 
He won their hearts and changed their 
lives, not by his sermons, but by his blessed 
friendship. He took them by the hand ; 
thus he lifted them up and they arose." ^ 
He was the Elder Brother. His life is 

1 The Heresy of Cain, p. 24. 



60 THE DOCTRINE OF BROTHERHOOD. 

the perfect manifestation of the divine hu- 
man brotherhood. His way of doing good 
is the true method of charity. 

We are trying, in these latter days, to 
learn this method. We call it sometimes 
the new charity. To minds sophisticated 
by the old notions of almsgiving it seems, 
indeed, a revelation ; and it is doubtful 
whether, in any age, the church of Christ 
has grasped the full meaning of this fact of 
brotherhood as related to the work of char- 
ity. To the multitude it is a new concep- 
tion, — one of those which is, we trust, to 
revolutionize our philanthropic enterprises. 
But there must have been, in a day long 
past, in Galilee and Decapolis and Jerusa- 
lem and beyond Jordan, many who saw 
this brotherhood revealed in its most per- 
fect pattern. 



IV. 

THE ONE AND THE MANY. 



Our theory of individualism — of each one for himself 
within the limits of the law, and those limits not too 
tightly drawn — must be qualified. The knowledge of the 
solidarity of interests, that all workers live by and through 
each other's labor, whether of hand or head, and that 
we all live by and through the accumulated results of 
science and civilization, should teach us that the benefits 
and blessings of civilization should not be monopolized 
by any class, that morally they belong to all. Our theory 
of private property will require revision and limitation. 
While in its essence the principle of private property 
must continue, — being, as we have seen, both an instinct 
of our nature, generated and continually intensified by 
twenty centuries of existence under it, as well as a ne- 
cessity of our complicated and ever-expanding modern 
life, — nevertheless there must be a new conception of it, 
of the rights which it is supposed to imply, and very par- 
ticularly of the obligations which it should impose on 
its possessor. The latter will have to be increased and 
emphasized ; the former will have to be curtailed. — 
William Graham, The Labor Problem, page 347. 

The unity that comes through organization is not so 
easy to define. It transcends space, almost annihilates 
time, defies mathematics, and is the despair of formal 
logic. The whole is in the parts, the parts are in the 
whole. There is an instantaneous response of each mem- 
ber to the condition of every other. The whole is more 
than the sum of its parts, and the internal relationships 
are so subtle that they cannot be adequately expressed in 
terms of action and reaction from without. The secret of 
this organic life is the nervous system, which binds each 
part to every other, makes the whole responsive to the 
needs of every part, and every part an instrument for the 
futherance of the needs of the whole. The whole gives 
to the parts whatever meaning and significance they have, 
and the parts in turn give to the whole whatever expres- 
sion and realization it attains. — William De Witt 
Hyde, Outlines of Social Theology, page 247. 



IV. 

THE ONE AND THE MANY. 

In the New Testament teaching about 
conduct two truths are emphasized, — the 
independence of the individual, the solidar- 
ity of society. 

In many passages the nature of moral 
responsibility as personal and individual is 
clearly affirmed. The fact that guilt and 
blameworthiness are not transferable ; that 
every man must bear his own burden ; that 
every man must give account of himself unto 
God ; that every man must work out his 
own salvation ; that the converting grace al- 
ways awaits the choice of the individual, — 
all this is made very plain. The evangelistic 
teaching of later years has wrought out this 
truth in high relief. It was a truth that 
needed emphasis, because it had been some- 
what obscured by the Augustinian theology ; 



64 THE ONE AND THE MANY, 

but the emphasis has been greatly exagger- 
ated. The solitariness of religious experience 
must not be denied, but neither must it be 
unduly magnified. Out of it may easily 
grow an unholy egoism which is far from 
the spirit of Christ. 

When the penitent is exhorted to believe 
that Christ died for him ; that the question 
of salvation is a purely personal matter be- 
tween himself and his Saviour ; that he must 
put all other suppliants out of his mind, 
and think of himself as standing solitary 
before the bar of judgment or the throne 
of grace, — we know what the exhortation 
means, and perceive the deep truth that 
underlies it ; but it is quite possible that 
the words may convey a wrong impression 
of the isolation of man in the act of salva- 
tion. 

The autobiographies of saints once re- 
garded as eminent, with their minute records 
of all the varying shades of individual expe- 
rience, marking them now as the subjects 
of special divine displeasure, and now as 



THE ONE AND THE MANY. 65 

the favorites of Heaven, represent a kind of 
pious egotism which is shocking to all right 
feeling. In large sections of the Christian 
church, the crucial question respecting the 
Christian life is, " How do you feel ? " Sal- 
vation, or at any rate the evidence of it, is, 
according to this view, a satisfied and pleas- 
urable feeling. Now, feeling is a purely 
personal matter ; and the religious experi- 
ence in which it is made the test must be 
of a very individualistic type. The reli- 
giousness which rests upon this foundation 
may easily coexist with a high degree of 
selfishness. When one learns in his devo- 
tions that his own personal satisfaction is 
the main concern, it will not be strange if 
he acts on that principle in other affairs. 
And those who make the most of their own 
personal moods and tenses in the matter of 
religion are the kind of persons who can 
easily convince themselves that they could 
be happy in heaven while their next of kin 
were weltering in everlasting torment. 

The religious experience which springs 



66 THE ONE AND THE MANY. 

from such an exaggerated idea of the in- 
dependence of the individual is likely to 
bear fruit in the social world. It easily 
falls in with that atomistic theory of society 
in which individual rights count for every- 
thing, and social obligations for little or 
nothing. The methods which it finds ready 
to its hand are those of unrestricted compe- 
tition; its motto is, "Every man for him- 
self." That there is to be a certain meas- 
ure of unity and cooperation in society is, 
of course, allowed ; but this is not to be con- 
sciously sought: it is to be brought about 
by an overruling Providence, under the 
sway of those economic harmonies whose 
function it is to resolve selfish intentions 
into benevolent issues. We are slowly 
finding out that this is a misplaced confi- 
dence; that when the individuals of which 
society is composed are all as selfish as they 
can be, the millennium rather tardily ar- 
rives. And it is already evident that a 
social philosophy whose principle is pure 
individualism can never give us the formula 



THE ONE AND THE MANY. 67 

of a peaceful and prosperous society. The 
exaggeration of this doctrine of the inde- 
pendence of the individual bears no better 
fruit in sociology than in morals or religion. 
The other doctrine of the solidarity of 
society has been subject also to much dis- 
proportionate statement. No doctrine is 
more clearly taught in the New Testament ; 
the truth that " we are members one of an- 
other" lies at the foundation of much of 
Paul's reasoning. The Adamic headship, 
also, whatever theological interpretation be 
given to it, involves the organic character 
of the human race and the tremendous 
facts of heredity. " Through one man sin 
entered into the world, and death through 
sin ; and so death passed unto all men, for 
that all sinned." " For as through the one 
man's disobedience the many were made 
sinners, even so through the obedience of 
the one shall the many be made righteous." 
" For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ 
shall all be made alive." Doubtless it is a 
great abuse to harden these glowing words 



68 THE ONE AND THE MANY. 

into logical statements ; none the less they 
do convey to every reader some sense of 
an organic unity of mankind by which the 
stock conceptions of theological individual- 
ism must be greatly modified. How much 
use has been made of these statements of 
human solidarity, I do not need to say. 
They have dominated the theology of large 
sections of the church, to the practical sup- 
pression of the truth of responsibility. And 
this doctrine, too, or something closely akin 
to it, has found its way into sociology. Theo- 
ries which represent the individual as hav- 
ing very little distinct character, as being 
the product of the social conditions under 
which he lives, have had numerous de- 
fenders, and there is a great truth here 
which no man can deny. " Each nation 
and tribe," says one writer, "produces in 
its children its own type of character, which 
has grown up in it, through the influence of 
the physical surroundings and past history 
of the people. Each individual is not a 
new phenomenon in the world, but only one 



THE ONE AND THE MANY. 69 

particular specimen of a race, whether he be 
' a yeoman whose limbs were made in Eng- 
land,' a painter whose eyes were developed 
in Italy, or a philosopher whose brain grew 
in Germany. And after the individual has 
been produced, with his particular type of 
potential character, the direction in which 
that character develops is determined by 
the habits and customs of his particular 
people and class. . . . From this point of 
view there is an obvious sense in which the 
relation of the individual to his society is 
an intrinsic one. His life is controlled 
both by the dead and by the living, among 
his people. He is what his fathers have 
been before him, except in so far as he has 
breathed a different air. Nor is this influ- 
ence of social environment something purely 
external, by which the individual is affected. 
There is not first the individual, and then 
the influences which mould his life. He is 
nothing except what he has become through 
the influence of that spiritual setting. There 
is nothing deeper in our nature than our 



70 THE ONE AND THE MANY. 

inherited traits ; there is nothing more our 
own than our natural disposition and senti- 
ments; there is nothing by which we are 
more possessed than the spirit of our time. 
We cannot go behind the elements of our 
constitution to find something deeper which 
we can regard as our very self, and which 
is prior to such impressions. They are the 
elements out of which our self has grown, 
and we can find nothing beyond them that 
in any deeper sense belongs to us, or that in 
any deeper sense is ^(?e." ^ 

All this shows how closely our intellec- 
tual lives are linked with the life of the 
generation in which we live, of the race 
from which we spring. Yet this doctrine 
of solidarity, like the doctrine of individu- 
alism, is often overstated. That man is 
identified with his kind is profoundly true ; 
but it is not true that in his fraternity he 
loses his identity. He cannot realize his 
own life apart from society, yet his relation 

1 An Introduction to Social Thilosophy, by J. S. Mac- 
kenzie, p. 150. 



THE ONE AND THE MANY. 71 

to society is not tliat of the Brahman to his 
deity. There is a social philosophy which 
dissolves the individual ; society is con- 
ceived as the menstruum in which the in- 
dividual disappears. The exaggeration of 
solidarity, which underlies some theories of 
socialism, is quite as common as the exag- 
geration oi individualism, and no less mis- 
leading. 

The error of individualism may be illus- 
trated by comparing society to a heap of 
sand. The individuals of which society 
is composed are like the separate grains of 
sand. They are entirely independent of each 
other ; none of them is affected in any way 
by any of the rest ; there is no giving or 
receiving among them ; there is not even 
any cohesion; there is simply aggregation. 
None of these grains of sand is any more 
or less a grain of sand because it happens 
to lie in this heap ; it would have precisely 
the same constitution and the same powers 
and properties if it were all alone by itself 
anywhere in the universe. 



72 THE ONE AND THE MANY. 

Now, the view of the extreme individual- 
ist tends toward a representation of society 
as somewhat resembling a sand-heap. No- 
body would adopt any such illustration, but 
much of the reasoning of many individu- 
alists suggests a kind of isolation and inde- 
pendence which is something like this. " A 
monadistic view of society," says Professor 
Mackenzie, " would be one which regarded 
all the individuals of whom the society is 
composed as by nature independent of each 
other, and as connected together only by a 
kind of accidental juxtaposition. Such a 
view would naturally lead to the conclusion 
that the connection of individuals in a soci- 
ety tends to interfere with the natural de- 
velopment of the individual life, and that it 
would be better for the individuals if they 
could manage to live apart." ^ 

In truth, the theory of the social con- 
tracts, upon which much of the political phi- 
losophy of recent times has been based, is 
often interpreted as meaning that the indi- 

^ Introduction to Social Philosophy^ p. 135. 



THE ONE AND THE MANY. 73 

vidual, in entering society, actually divests 
himself of a portion of his personal rights, 
— reduces, to a considerable extent, the sum 
of his powers. The noble savage in the 
state of nature is, according to this view, a 
completer man than the member of a civ- 
ilized community. All those who think, 
with Mr. Herbert Spencer, that government 
is a necessary evil, rest their belief upon 
this assumption. And those who go a little 
further than Mr. Spencer, and preach that 
government is an unnecessary evil — that it 
is wholly accursed and injurious — carry 
the theory of individualism to its logical 
issue. A thoroughly consistent individual- 
ist is, of course, an anarchist. The abso- 
lute independence of the individual is the ne- 
gation of social order and of political society. 
Mr. Spencer, in the earlier editions of his 
" Social Statics," enumerates among the 
fundamental rights of man " the right to 
ignore the state," " the right of the citizen 
to adopt a condition of voluntary outlawry. 
If every man," he says, "has freedom to do 



74 THE ONE AND THE MANY, 

all that he wills, provided he infringes not 
the equal freedom of any other man, then 
he is free to drop connection with the state, 
— to relinquish its protection and to refuse 
paying toward its support." I do not think 
that Mr. Spencer would wish to be held 
responsible to-day for this language, but it 
is a fair statement of the logical outcome of 
a doctrine which makes the individual every- 
thing and the social order nothing. 

The error of socialism, on the other hand, 
may be illustrated by comparing society to 
a chemical compound, into which the vari- 
ous ingredients enter by surrendering their 
own proper constitution, and becoming un- 
distinguishable elements in the new sub- 
stance. " In a chemical combination," says 
Professor Mackenzie, " the parts are not in- 
trinsically related to the whole, but are rather 
lost in the whole. So long as they continue 
to exist as separate parts they are indepen- 
dent of the whole, but in the whole they 
become transfigured. Nor can there be 
any development in such a system, nor any 



THE ONE AND THE MANY. 75 

end towards which a development could be 
directed : the parts are swallowed up in the 
whole, so that nothing further can take 
place in the system except by its dissolu- 
tion." ^ This is the logical basis of the phi- 
losophy of socialism ; and its outcome would 
be a view of society "which regarded the 
union of human beings as the primary fact 
with regard to them, and the individual life 
as the mere outcome of social conditions. 
The natural conclusion of this view would 
be that the individual has no right to any 
independent life of his own ; that he owes 
all that he is and has to the society in 
which he is born; and that society may 
fairly use him as a mere means to its devel- 
opment." ^ 

The chemical illustration doubtless over- 
states the error of the socialists as much as 
the illustration of the sand-heap overstates 
the error of the individualists ; but, like that 
other illustration, it shows us the direction 

1 Introduction to Social Philosophy, p. 147. 

2 Ibid., p. 135. 



76 THE ONE AND THE MANY. 

in which the theory is traveling. And it 
must be owned that, with many socialistic 
philosophers, it has traveled far in this direc- 
tion. The socialistic contention certainly 
does lay so much stress on the improve- 
ment of the mass that it ignores or greatly 
undervalues the integrity of the individual. 
This is its inherent weakness. The most 
acute of modern critics has solid ground 
under his feet when he declares that the 
socialist polemic against private property 
" betrays an entire blindness to the essen- 
tial elements of the social organism, which 
can only exist as a structure of free indi- 
vidual wills, each entertaining the social 
purpose in an individual form appropriate 
to its structural position and organic func- 
tions." 1 

We can make this clear by considering 
that property, private property, is the condi- 
tion of the best social order. The best social 
order results from the social union and co- 

1 The Civilization of Christianity^ by Bernard Bosan- 
qnet, p. 329. 



THE ONE AN ID THE MANY. 11 

operation of the highest type of men and 
women ; and the highest type of manhood 
and womanhood can only be produced when 
men and women have the free use of prop- 
erty. Property is, indeed, the raw material 
for the development of character. It is in 
property, Hegel says, that my will is made 
real for me as a personal will. Property 
is the concentrated form of power, and it 
is in the exercise of power that my will is 
trained and disciplined. 

It is in the realm of property rights and 
obligations that my personality is largely 
shaped. Until I have learned to use prop- 
erty conscientiously and beneficently, I have 
not equipped myself for the highest service 
of my fellow-men. In making it the in- 
strument of promoting human welfare, more 
than in any other possible way, I socialize 
my own will, and prepare myself to enter 
into helpful relations with my fellow-men. 
I cannot learn this lesson in the use of prop- 
erty which I hold in common with my fel- 
lows. It must be my own ; I must be free 



78 THE ONE AND THE MANY. 

to express my own will in dealing with it ; 
I cannot be unselfish in the use of that 
which is not mine ; the most direct and ef- 
fective discipline in unselfishness is that 
which is gained in using private property 
beneficently. 

The fundamental assumption of social- 
ism seems to be that if men possess pri- 
vate property they will use it selfishly; 
therefore, the socialists say, we will have 
no private property. The remedy would 
not be effectual. It is rather difficult to 
abolish all vestiges of private property. 
Hands and feet and eyes and tongues are 
possessions and instruments not easily alien- 
ated, and those who would use money or 
machinery selfishly would be quite sure to 
go on using all their personal powers in 
the same way after they were divested of 
money and machinery ; claws and fists and 
elbows and teeth would still be private prop- 
erty, and a very unsocial use might be made 
of them. Unless the will has been social- 
ized, unless men have learned how to use 



THE ONE AND THE MANY. 79 

all their powers and possessions for the com- 
mon welfare, the society in which they live 
will bear very little resemblance to heaven, 
no matter how small their personal belong- 
ings may be. 

We are told, indeed, by modern exposi- 
tors of socialism, that their scheme does not 
contemplate the abolition of private prop- 
erty in income, but only of private property 
in the means of production. All incomes 
would be the remuneration of labor, and 
would be paid by the state in labor checks 
entitling the receiver to specified amounts 
of goods in the public stores. The receiver 
might expend them as he pleased ; he might 
also give them away, or hoard them : he 
could not openly lend them upon interest, 
for the law would forbid that; nor could 
he employ them in any kind of profitable 
traffic. In a certain limited sense, there- 
fore, the recent socialists provide for private 
property. And a certain narrow discipline 
would be gained by frugality, conscientious- 
ness, and benevolence in the use of this 



80 THE ONE AND THE MANY. 

private income. But all that larger disci- 
pline to which I have referred, which comes 
through the socialization of the will by the 
beneficent use of property in productive 
enterprises, — in making it the servant of 
a broad-minded philanthropy, — would be 
impossible under socialism. And it seems 
to me that the prohibition of private en- 
terprise — of the productive use of prop- 
erty as capital, of the free exercise by 
individuals of the power which property 
confers — would greatly limit the range 
of human development. It is true that it 
would remove many temptations, and that 
it would take from cruel hands a great in- 
strument of oppression ; but is it not, after 
all, better to let men have power and teach 
them how to use it? It must be remem- 
bered that the socialistic programme rests 
upon a profound disbelief in the possibility 
of socializing the individual will, and in this 
I find its condemnation. 

A society composed of persons who were 
the possessors of goods which they called 



THE ONE AND THE MANY. 81 

their own, but wliicli they had learned to 
use freely in the promotion of the common 
welfare, would be a good society ; while a 
society based upon the assumption that all 
that a man has will be used selfishly, and 
that therefore the range of individual pos- 
session must be sharply limited, is perfectly 
certain to be a very bad society. 

The chemical solution of individual rights 
which the socialists propose is likely to form 
a highly explosive mixture. 

Neither the sand-heap nor the chemical 
compound furnishes us a good analogy of 
the structure of human society. Is it pos- 
sible for us to find a better analogy ? I 
believe that it is, and that we shall find 
our most helpful suggestion in that figure 
of the living organism which Paul, in one 
form or another, so frequently uses. Doubt- 
less the biological analogies all fail at cer- 
tain points ; our parables will not go upon 
all-fours; and there are certain important 
respects in which the social organism differs 
essentially from that of the plant or the ani- 



82 THE ONE AND THE MANY, 

mal. But this illustration takes us nearer 
to the truth than any other which the king- 
doms of nature furnish us. Paul gives us 
the thought in that passage of his in the 
Ephesians in which he speaks of the work 
of the Holy Spirit in the world as the 
building up of " the body of Christ." By 
" speaking truth in love," he says, " we may 
grow up in all things unto Him which is the 
head, even Christ ; from whom the whole 
body, fitly framed and knit together through 
that which every joint supplieth, according 
to the working in due measure of each sev- 
eral part, maketh the increase of the body 
unto the building up of itself in love." 
Here is the true account of the relation of 
the one to the many. In the highest sense 
the many are one, — one body : but the 
union is not chemical, it is organic; the 
parts have an identity of their own; each 
one of the many is one, but it finds its life 
in the life of the larger unity. It is through 
that service which every organ supplieth 
that the organism lives ; it is by the work- 



THE ONE AND THE MANY. 83 

ing in due measure of each several part that 
the body grows ; and yet it is one body, and 
none of the members has any life or mean- 
ing or value in itself apart from the body. 
The relation of the members to the body 
is very different from the relation of the 
grains of sand to the sand-heap on the one 
hand, and from the relation of the several 
ingredients of the chemical compound on the 
other : there is a real unity, as there is not 
in the sand-heap ; and there is the harmony 
of separate parts and powers, as there is 
not in the chemical solution which destroys 
the identity of the substances composing it. 
" An organism," says Professor Mackenzie, 
"is a real whole in a sense in which no 
other kind of unity is so. It is in seii^so 
totus^ teres^ atqice rotundus,^^ All its parts 
belong to it ; they cannot be altered, so to 
speak, without its own consent ; and the end 
which it seeks is also its own. At the same 
time it is a universe and not a unit ; it has 
parts ; and it does grow, and it has an end. 
We may define it, therefore, as a whole 



84 THE ONE AND THE MANY. 

whose parts are intrinsically related to it, 
which develops from within, and has refer- 
ence to an end that is involved in its own 
nature." ^ 

We have had a good deal of discussion, 
some of it not over-clear, upon this question 
of the organic nature of human society. 
But Mr. Mackenzie's generalization which I 
have just quoted does, I believe, accurately 
describe human society. It is " a whole 
whose parts are intrinsically related to it." 
The individual cannot be separated from 
the society in which he lives and retain 
his individuality. The " organic filaments " 
which bind him to his fellow-men are vital 
elements in his own life, and they are 
constantly multiplying. " Thus," says Mr. 
Bosanquet, " if the individual in ancient 
Greece was like a centre to which a thou- 
sand threads of relation were attached, the 
individual in modern Europe might be com- 
pared to a centre on which there hang many, 
many millions." So far is it from being 
^ Introduction to Social Philosophy^ p. 148. 



THE ONE AND THE MANY. 85 

true that society is constituted by the voli- 
tional action of persons, that it is even true 
that the "person,'' as we know him to-day, 
is the product of social development. " The 
unit of an ancient society was the family, of 
a modern society the individual." So says 
Sir Henry Maine. " Persons," with definite 
rights, are the fruit of social progre^. 
This is not to say that the conscious moral 
force of the individual himself has not 
helped towards this emancipation, but he 
never could have won it except through the 
medium of society. " The individual /)er- 
S07^," says Mr. Ritchie, "the citizen with 
rights and duties, is a complex of ideas, emo- 
tions, and aspirations which are altogether 
unintelligible except as the product of cease- 
less action and reaction in the spiritual 
(i. e, intellectual, moral, etc.) environment, 
which not merely surrounds, but actually 
constitutes, the individual, — i, e, makes him 
what he is. The history of the individual 
cannot be understood apart from the his- 
tory of the race, though of course in prac- 



86 THE ONE AND THE MANY. 

tice we have to limit ourselves to a small 
portion." ^ 

This vital relation of the individual to the 
society of which he is a member is the one 
fruitful thought of modern times. It is 
easy to run it into absurdity by trying to 
find in society parts or organs analogous 
to every part or organ of the human body ; 
nevertheless the conception is extremely 
fruitful, and, as a help in escaping from the 
barren immoralities of the old individual- 
ism, we cannot be too thankful for it. It is 
important to mark the differences between 
the social organism and the biological struc- 
tures to which it is assimilated. " The truth 
is," says Mr. Ritchie, " that society (or the 
state) is not an organism because we can 
compare it to a beast or a man, but because 
it cannot be understood by the help of any 
lower — i, e, less complex — conception 
than that of organism. In it, as in an 
organism, every part is conditioned by the 
whole. In a mere aggregate or heap, the 

1 Principles of State Interference, p^ 15. 



THE ONE AND THE MANY. 87 

units are prior to the whole ; in an organ- 
ism, the whole is prior to the parts, — i, e, 
they can only be understood in reference to 
the whole. But because the conception of 
an organism is more adequate to society 
than the conception of an artificial com- 
pound, it does not follow that it is fully 
adequate." ^ 

Social organisms, as the same writer sug- 
gests, differ from other organisms in having 
the remarkable property of making them- 
selves. There is a dynamic of the spirit 
here, for which no analogy can be found in 
the biological structures. And in truth it 
appears, as I have already hinted, that the 
very progress of society is toward the de- 
velopment of individuality, and society be- 
comes more and more thoroughly organized 
through the consentaneous action of indi- 
vidual wills. " If it is true," says Mr. 
Mackenzie, " that the individual is formed 
by the habits and customs of his people, it 
is true also that the habits and customs of 

1 Principles of State Interference, p. 49. 



88 THE ONE AND THE MANY. 

the people grow out of the characters of the 
individual citizen. The relation of the in- 
dividual to society is similar in kind to the 
relation of the will of an individual to his 
character. As will is the expression of 
character, so is the individual the expression 
of his society ; but as change of character 
takes place only through acts of will, so a 
change in society takes place only through 
change in its individual members. And 
just as our wills are free, although they are 
the expression of our characters, so the in- 
dividual has an independent life, although 
he is the expression of his society." ^ 

This admirable statement will enable us 
to hold fast to the two contrasted trutlis in 
whose coi5rdination we find the law of so- 
ciety. Such an organism as is here clearly 
indicated, society certainly is ; and the power 
to recognize these subtle relations, and to 
adapt our voluntary efforts at construction 
to the facts of the case, should be sought by 
all social reformers. 

1 Introduction to Social Philosophy^ p. 157. 



THE ONE AND THE MANY. 89 

It may be supposed that a discussion like 
this of the theory of society, of the relation 
of the one to the many, is of no practical 
value. "It is interesting," it may be said; 
"it satisfies our intellectual cravings, but 
has nothing to do with every-day life." On 
the contrary, I believe that nothing is more 
practical. A sound philosophy of society is 
the condition of all right conduct. The ori- 
gin and value of philosophy, says a recent 
writer, is "in an attempt to give a reason- 
able account of our own personal attitude 
towards the more serious business of life. 
You philosophize when you reflect critically 
upon what you are actually doing in your 
world. What you are doing is, of course, 
in the first place living, and life involves 
passions, faiths, doubts, and courage. The 
critical inquiry into what all these things 
mean and imply is philosophy. We have 
our faith in life ; we want reflectively to 
estimate this faith. . . . Whether we will 
it or no, we all of us do philosophize. . . . 
The moral order, the evils of life, the au- 



90 THE ONE AND THE MANY. 

thority of conscience, the intentions of God, 
how often have I not heard them discussed, 
and with a wise and critical skepticism, too, 
by men who seldom looked into books ! " ^ 
We all have our philosophical explanation 
of life ; and it is of the utmost importance 
that it be a sound explanation, for all our 
conduct is shaped by it. Salvation can 
mean nothing more than help in realizing 
our own idea of life, unless it also involves 
help in understanding what life means. 
From what are we saved ? From sin, is 
the orthodox answer. And what is sin? 
It is the transgression of the law, or want 
of conformity to the law. What law ? The 
law of life. And the law of life is simply 
the expression of our relation to our en- 
vironment, which is precisely what we have 
been talking about. We must have clear 
ideas about what that law requires of us be- 
fore we can be saved from sin. The grace 
that bringeth salvation comes to help us to 

^ The Spirit of Modern Philosophy, by Josiah Royce, 
pp. 1, 2. 



THE ONE AND THE MANY. 91 

live according to the law of life. If any 
man accepts the doctrine of individualism 
or the doctrine of socialism as the correct 
statement of the law of life, he will be pray- 
ing for aid to conform his conduct to that 
doctrine. If that doctrine is unsound his 
conduct will be bad. There are millions of 
people all over the world who are devoutly 
praying for help in doing wrong. What 
they need is not more religion, but a better 
philosophy of life. 

Every man has a philosophy of life. It 
may be implicit rather than explicit ; he 
may not be able to formulate it ; but there 
are certain underlying principles which con- 
dition all his conduct, and it is of the last 
importance that these principles be sound 
and true. 

Let me try to indicate with some particu- 
larity just what the effect of a sound philos- 
ophy will be upon some phases of conduct. 

1. In the experience of personal religion, 
for example, how will the organic theory of 
life be found to work ? 



92 THE ONE AND THE MANY. 

The Christian man will not, under the 
influence of this theory, forget that he is 
a person ; that his relations with the Father 
of spirits are primarily personal ; that the 
responsibilities of life rest upon him, and 
cannot be evaded; that nobody can repent 
or believe for him ; and that there is work 
in the kingdom of God which none but he 
can do. On the other hand, he will feel 
that in his deepest religious experiences he 
is not separated from his fellow-men, but 
identified with them. His chief happiness 
, as a Christian will consist, not in inward 
raptures, but in the fellowship of the spirit. 
He will think very little about enjoying re- 
ligion, and a great deal about the privilege 
and honor of service. His best evidence 
that he is a Christian disciple will not be 
in some ecstasy by which he is distinguished 
from his fellows, but in the knowledge that 
his deepest purpose is to seek first the king- 
dom of God. 

Under the theory of individualism, which 
makes the supreme religious obligation the 



THE ONE AND THE MANY. 93 

saving of one's own soul, great intensity of 
religious enthusiasm is often engendered, 
and the rapt saint finds high satisfaction 
in the indulgence of his emotions ; but such 
experiences are no bar to an intolerant, ex- 
acting, overbearing temper; those who are 
most distinguished for their emotional exal- 
tations are quite apt to be censorious and 
quarrelsome. This is precisely what we 
should expect ; a theory of life which makes 
the individual the centre of the universe is 
not likely to bring peace and goodwill to 
his neighbors. 

On the other hand, the socialistic theory 
so disparages the individual that the per- 
sonal relations of men to God are wholly 
obscured, and the personal services of man 
to man are greatly undervalued. 

2. This leads us to consider the effect 
upon our social conduct of the realization of 
the truth that we are members of one body. 
The man who really believes this will not, 
on the one hand, forget that the welfare of 
society depends on his individual action. He 



94 THE ONE AND THE MANY. 

will remember that the health and growth 
of the body depend upon the working in 
due measure of each several part. And yet 
he knows that it is only " in love" that the 
body is built up ; that the co(5peration of 
part with part, and the ministry of each to 
the good of all, is the very law of its being. 
If he were a socialist, he would expect to 
secure some new organization of society by 
which the good of all would be secured 
without effort or sacrifice on the part of 
any. If he were an individualist, he would 
say, in the words of one of them, that 
'' every man and woman in society has one 
big duty : that is, to take care of his or her 
own self." But, being a Christian, he does 
not adopt the heresy of Cain, nor does he 
expect salvation by machinery. He knows 
that the welfare of the many is the fruit of 
the efforts and sacrifices of each one, and 
that the welfare of each one is found in the 
health and happiness of the many. He 
knows, in short, the truth of that saying 
which I have alreadj^ quoted, that " the social 



THE ONE AND THE MANY, 95 

organism can only exist as a structure of free 
individual wills, each entertaining the social 
purpose in an individual form." He must 
have his own power and use it, his own pos- 
sessions and employ them, but all must be 
done for the welfare of the community with 
which his life is inseparably joined. He 
can never say, '' This money is mine, and I 
shall do what I will with it ; " that is not 
his conception of the function of money. 
Nor can he say, " This business is mine, and 
I shall manage it to suit myself ; " business 
has quite another meaning to him. Money, 
as he has learned to think of it, is the chief 
instrument of beneficence ; business is the 
great opportunity of social ministry. Office 
is not to him a chance for self-aggrandize- 
ment or plunder, but a call to consecrated 
service ; learning is not a staff by which 
he climbs to heights where the multitude 
cannot follow, but a torch wherewith he 
lights the lowly paths of human kind ; art 
is not a ministration to his selfhood, but a 
witness to the beauty which is the common 



96 THE ONE AND THE MANY. 

heritage of man. In short, he has learned 
that the chief end of man is not the upbuild- 
ing of one at the cost of the many, nor the 
absorption of one in the life of the many, 
but the perfection of one in the blessedness 
of the many. 



V. 

THE SACRED AND THE SECULAR. 



I know nothing" which has exercised a more pernicious 
influence on religion than that unhappy divorce which 
has been effected between religious duty and the every- 
day duties of life. When a mother is faithfully tending 
her children, and making her hearthstone clean and her fire 
burn bright, that everything may smile a welcome to 
her weary husband when he returns from his work, it is 
never dreamt that she is religiously employed. When a 
man works hard during the day and returns to his family 
in the evening to make them all happy by his placid 
temper and quiet jokes and dandlings on the knee, the 
world does not think — perhaps he does not think him- 
self — that there is religion in anything so common as this. 
Religion is supposed to stand aloof from such familiar 
scenes. But to attend the church, to take the sacrament, 
to sing a psalm, to say a prayer, is religion. Now God 
help this poor sinful world if religion consists only in 
these things and not also in the other. — John Cunning- 
ham, in Scotch Sermons, page 46. 

We cannot expect the mass of men to take an interest 
in the technical parts of religion, in the details of the 
modes of worship, or the peculiar ways of expression, 
on which most controversies turn. These are the pro- 
fessional business of a class, — the ministers of public 
worship, the professed theologians. But every man, nay 
every human being, can learn to do his duty as in God's 
sight, and in the spirit of our Lord Jesus Christ; and 
the more each one is earnestly engaged in this effort, the 
more he will feel the need of the divine help, and the more 
he will lean with manly trust on the support of Christ and 
of the Holy Spirit. The contact of Christian faith with 
the secular life is good for both. The one is prevented 
from sinking into weak refinement, the other is raised 
from its grossness to become the temple of God. — W. 
H. Fremantle, The Gospel of the Secular Life, page 71. 



THE SACRED AND THE SECULAR. 

"I CA3IE not," said Jesus, "to judge tlie 
world, but to save the world." It may be 
well to pause in the middle of the last de- 
cade of the nineteenth century of the Chris- 
tian era, and try to understand the meaning 
of these words of Jesus Christ, — " I came 
to save the world." It was a tremendous 
saying when it was first uttered by a Gali- 
lean peasant in the temple court at Jerusa- 
lem. How does it strike our minds to-day ? 
Is its meaning any clearer now than it was 
then, or its promise any surer? 

There are those who assume to be the 
special representatives of this Christ upon 
the earth, and who declare, if I rightly 
understand them, that the purpose of the 
Christ, as here announced, has not been 
fulfilled ; that his lofty enterprise has met 



100 THE SACRED AND THE SECULAR. 

with ignominious failure ; that he has not 
saved the world, and gives no indication of 
being able to save it ; that, in spite of his 
church and his gospel and his spirit, the 
world is steadily growing worse; that no- 
thing is now left for Him but to reverse his 
original purpose and come and judge the 
world, and destroy what he is powerless, by 
moral and spiritual influences, to save. I 
will not discuss this theory ; I will only say 
that I do not find in history, nor in the philos- 
ophy of faith, nor in the words of Christ, any- 
thing to justify it. I still believe that when 
Christ said, " I came to save the world," He 
was no callow enthusiast, proposing to him- 
self a scheme far too vast for his powers. I 
believe that He has not been disappointed ; 
that the joy that was set before Him was no 
illusion ; that He has shown himself mighty 
to save the world, and that the world through 
Him is being saved. And I own that the 
denial of this fact, or skepticism about it, 
seems to me the deadliest heresy now alive 
in the Christian church. 



THE SACBED AND THE SECULAR, 101 

Others there are who interpret these 
words of Christ in a somewhat different 
sense. They do not dispute his power to 
save individuals out of the world, — many 
individuals ; perhaps they would admit that 
the day might come when all men would be 
converted. But this salvation of individ- 
uals, as they seem to conceive it, has no per- 
ceptible effect upon the physical world or 
the social world. Men are converted and 
brought into the church, which is the so- 
ciety of the regenerate, and from this time 
they cease to have any vital relations with 
the world. The world stands over against 
them in contrast, sometimes in antagonism ; 
the world is to be struggled against and 
overcome, but it is not to be saved. The 
whole framework of society — its industries, 
amusements, customs, governments, arts — 
is regarded as an alien and even a hostile 
kingdom. That Christ came to save this 
is an idea that a great many Christians 
have not entertained. Christ comes, as they 
suppose, to save men out of the world ; but 



102 THE SACRED AND THE SECULAR. 

when these individuals are converted, their 
trade, their politics, their institutions, their 
fashions, their work, their play, still re- 
main unsubdued by the influences of the 
Spirit, — a realm of carnality and ungod- 
liness. 

It is rather difficult for any one who pos- 
sesses a little imagination to conceive of 
such a condition of things as this. The 
fact being that all these social features are 
the expression of the lives of individuals in 
social relations, one finds it hard to under- 
stand how the people could all be saved 
and the social order left untouched. It 
seems a little like supposing that the warp 
and the woof might both be changed from 
hemp to silk and the web still be hempen, 
or that the springs which feed the brook 
might all be cleansed without purifying the 
water of the brook. But the fact that a 
conception is difficult is no stumbling-block 
to some kinds of heroic faith. And it must 
be admitted that this idea of a world left 
substantially unaffected by the progress of 



THE SACBED AND THE SECULAR. 103 

the church — a world out of which the 
church is gathered, and with which it can 
maintain no relations but those of hostil- 
ity — is the notion which has dominated 
the thought of the church through all the 
generations. 

Doubtless there are many passages of 
Scripture which seem to support this the- 
ory. The free, popular, poetic use of lan- 
guage which we find in the Bible leaves 
room for many misconceptions. I have no 
time here to gather and analyze these pas- 
sages. " The world," in some of them, 
does signify the mass of unholy and anti- 
Christian powers. The tenth definition of 
" world " in the Century Dictionary is this : 
" The part of mankind that is devoted to 
the affairs of this life, or interested in secu- 
lar affairs ; those concerned especially for 
the interests and pleasures of the present 
state of existence ; the unregenerate or un- 
godly part of humanity." There are texts 
of Scripture not a few, in which this defi- 
nition would give the exact meaning. But 



104 THE SACBED AND THE SECULAR, 

there are other texts in which this cannot 
be the meaning : " Ye are the light of the 
world." " The field is the world." " The 
gospel shall be preached in the whole 
world." '' Go ye into all the world and 
preach the gospel to every creature." " God 
sent not his Son into the world to condemn 
the world, but that the world through Him 
might be saved." " God so loved the world 
that he gave his only begotten Son, that who- 
soever believeth in Him might not perish, 
but have everlasting life." " For the bread 
of God is that which cometh down from 
heaven and giveth life unto the world." In 
many such texts it is evident that the word 
is used to describe the human race, human- 
ity, man and his environment; that it is 
not thought of as a hostile realm set over 
against the kingdom of heaven, but as the 
subject of Christ's redeeming and saving 
grace. And this is clearly the significance 
of the text before us. It is the world 
— the whole world, lying in wickedness 
now, but waiting with earnest expectation. 



THE SACRED AND THE SECULAR, 105 

groaning and travailing together, for the 
promised redemption ; it is the cosmos, riven 
and shattered no doubt in many of its fair- 
est tracts by chaotic forces, but still the 
cosmos which sprang into being at first 
from the mind and the heart of God — that 
Christ came to save. And He has not failed 
in doing what He came to do. He is saving 
the world, the whole of it ; He is bringing 
back lost Paradise ; his saving health is 
known not only to individuals, but to na- 
tions, societies, institutions ; nay, it is even 
true that his healing and transforming 
power is felt in the physical world, and 
that wherever He goes the wilderness and 
the solitary place are glad for Him, and the 
desert rejoices and blossoms as the rose. 
When a man is saved from vice and ani- 
malism, the signs of his regeneration are apt 
to appear in the house which he inhabits ; 
the new life will quickly make for itself a 
new environment. It is quite as true of the 
race as of an individual. The redemption 
of man involves the redemption of the earth 



106 THE SACBED AND THE SECULAR, 

whereon lie dwells. Is not the physical 
world the subject of redemption? When 
we hear Paul explaining in the Epistle to 
the Colossians how the world came into ex- 
istence, it seems not incredible that it should 
be redeemed. For he tells us that Christ, 
the image of the invisible God, is " the first- 
born of all creation ; for in Him were all 
things created, in the heavens and upon the 
earth; ... all things have been created 
through Him and unto Him, and He is be- 
fore all things, and in Him all things con- 
sist." The whole creation is fashioned in 
Christ; his life permeates and animates it 
all ; it lives in Him. The immanence of God 
is a thought which has become familiar to 
devout thinkers, and it is a very fruitful 
conception. "Perhaps," says Canon Fre- 
mantle, "we may gain a more living con- 
ception of God by speaking of Him as the 
soul of the world, and comparing his action 
to that of the vital power of man upon his 
body ; or, in animated nature, to the action 
of the inner principle of life upon the parti- 



THE SACBED AND THE SECULAR. 107 

cles of matter which make up the organ- 
ism." This doctrine of God immanent in 
nature needs to be supplemented, of course, 
by the doctrine of God transcendent over 
nature. But in this passage of Paul's we 
have the explicit statement of the imma- 
nence of the Christ in creation: the Christ 
idea, the Christ principle, — the substance 
of that which Christ stands for and reveals 
to us, — is part of the very framework of the 
physical world, has been so from the dawn 
of creation. This is the great thought 
which Professor Drummond has so pow- 
erfully presented to us in " The Ascent of 
Man." With abundant learning, with mar- 
velous eloquence, he shows us that when 
man thought that 

" Nature, red in tootli and claw 
With raven, shrieked against his creed," 

he did not understand Nature ; that love, 
more than hate, is the song of her choiring 
voices ; that the struggle for life has for its 
perpetual counterpart the struggle for the 
life of others. Here is the Christ idea, the 



108 THE SACBED AND THE SECULAR, 

Christ principle, imbedded in the very order 
of the physical world, precisely as Paul has 
told us. And if the creation has shared with 
man the losses and disorders which have 
resulted from his disobedience, it may also 
share with him in the redemptive and re- 
generative work which Christ has come to 
perform. It is not by its own will, for it 
has no will of its own, but by reason of its 
identification with man, that it has been 
subjected to vanity and misery; but Paul, 
with the insight of a spiritual imagination, 
beholds it waiting, with earnest expectation, 
for the day when it shall be manifest that 
men are the sons of God, because then the 
creation also shall be delivered from the 
bondage of corruption into the glorious lib- 
erty of the sons of God. 

It is thus made evident that even the phy- 
sical world is not a region foreign to the 
Prince of life ; that the very love of which 
He was the incarnation is the element in 
which all things consist or hold together ; 
and that the work of saving the world must 



THE SACRED AND THE SECULAR. 109 

include the renovation and the restoration 
of the natural as well as the spiritual order. 

And if even the physical world is the sub- 
ject of this redemptive work, much more 
must the framework of the social order be 
included in the redemptive process. The 
social framework, the customs, institutions, 
laws of society, are simply the organs by 
which the human race lives and has its 
being: the notion that men can be saved 
apart from these is something like the no- 
tion that a man who is sick can be made well 
while his heart and his brain and his lungs 
and his stomach and all the rest of his vital 
organs are fatally diseased. 

The truth that Christ came to save the 
world must be accepted, then, in its largest 
sense. Any attempt to restrict his salvation 
to those interests which are expressed by 
the church as an ecclesiasticism is mischiev- 
ous in the extreme. When you have fenced 
religion off into a separate realm, you have 
not only robbed society of the only power 
that can keep it from putrefaction, you have 



110 THE SACRED AND THE SECULAR. 

doomed religion itself to paralysis and death. 
The kingdom of heaven is the leaven which 
pervades the whole mass of society, and 
which is destined to bring, and which is 
bringing, the whole of life into harmony with 
the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus. 
This brings us face to face with that sepa- 
ration of life into the sacred and the secu- 
lar which lies at the basis of so much of 
our current thinking, but which is, in its 
common form, one of the most essentially ir- 
religious ideas that the human mind can en- 
tertain. It goes back to the old Gnosticism, 
to the old Median and Persian Dualism ; it 
has been working in the church from the 
earliest ages ; it was the seed out of which 
monasticism sprung ; it has seemed well- 
nigh impossible to rid the church of its 
baneful influence. This false distinction 
it was that underlay that papal hierarchy 
against which our fathers, in the early days 
of the Reformation, lifted up their protest. 
It was shutting religion into the church and 
out of the world that made the Keformation 



THE SACRED AND THE SECULAR. Ill 

necessary. It was the sacerdotal ideas of 
that time against which William Tyndale, 
the translator of the Bible, was inveighing 
when he wrote : " For, since these false mon- 
sters crope up into our consciences, and 
robbed us of the knowledge of our Saviour 
Jesus Christ, making us believe in such 
pope-holy works, and to think that there 
was no other way into heaven, we have not 
wearied to build them abbeys, cloisters, 
colleges, chauntries, and cathedral churches 
with high steeples, striving and envying each 
other which should do most. And as for 
the deeds which pertain to our neighbors 
and to the commonwealth, we have not re- 
garded at all, as things which seem no holy 
works, or such as God would not once look 
upon. And therefore we left them unseen 
to, until they were past remedy, or past 
our power to remedy them." ^ It was 
this church-cribbed, priest-centred religion 
against which the pulpit of Savonarola thun- 
dered, and the lecture-room of Colet rang, 
1 Deman's Life of Tyndale, p. 277. 



112 THE SACREB AND THE SECULAR, 

and the pen of Erasmus flashed, in the open- 
ing campaigns of that great controversy. 
That Protestants should fall into this snare 
is an instructive but not a very curious fact. 
It is the law of the machine. When Pro- 
testantism succeeded in building up ecclesias- 
ticisms of its own, it at once began to exalt 
them above all the rest of life ; to separate 
between them and all the rest of life ; to 
regard them as holy and the rest of life as 
profane. That, to this day, is the prevail- 
ing idea. It is not the universal idea, for 
there are many in this generation to whom 
the larger truth that Christ came to save 
the world is becoming increasingly plain ; 
but there still lingers, in the minds of the 
majority of professing Christians, the notion 
that religion is an interest wholy separate 
from the rest of life ; that religion is sacred, 
while business and politics and amusement 
and education and art are essentially and 
necessarily secular ; and that religion cannot 
be brought into contact with these other in- 
terests without suffering some serious loss of 



THE SACBEB AND THE SECULAR. 113 

its own purity and dignity. The popu- 
lar notions on this subject are not nearly 
so gross as once they were. We have 
got pretty well past that time which Dr. 
George Hodges describes in this stinging 
paragraph : — 

" No man's sense of religion was affronted 
by the account given of the French cardinal, 
who was declared to be mean, cruel, avari- 
cious, and dishonorable, but very religious. 
Benvenuto Cellini broke all the command- 
ments, but attended the services of the 
church with regularity and devotion, and 
believed that his steps were guarded by the 
blessed angels. An honest, pure-hearted, 
God-fearing heretic, no matter how upright 
his life, would go to hell. But a loyal son 
of the true church, who recited the creed and 
knelt at the sacrament, might live most 
basely and yet have place hereafter with 
patriarchs and saints among the saved." ^ 
No such statement as that would hold good 
to-day in any branch of the church in this 

^ The Heresy of Cain, p. 11. 



114 THE SACRED AND THE SECULAR, 

country. We are certainly making prog- 
ress in our realization of the idea that per- 
sonal religion cannot be separated from 
personal morality. But we still hold fast 
— many of us — to the notion that religion 
has a sphere to itself, and that the distinc- 
tion between the church and the world must 
be maintained and emphasized ; that a cer- 
tain part of life is under religious motive, 
and that another and far larger part of life 
is tinder motives of another sort, and that 
the two realms cannot be brought together. 
The truth is, that this distinction between 
the sacred and the secular is utterly mis- 
leading. What do we mean by the secu- 
lar ? If the essence of secularity is selfish- 
ness, greed, pride, cruelty, hardness of heart, 
there is plenty of all these in the church 
itself. Are not the competitive methods by 
which place and distinction in the house of 
God are sold for money essentially secular ? 
Is not the pushing of the schemes of secta- 
rian aggrandizement in our cities, in utter 
defiance of the comity of churches, a secular 



THE SACRED AND THE SECULAR. 115 

proceeding ? Are not the politics of a good 
many of our ecclesiastical assemblies about 
as secular as any other kind of politics? 
When the mob spirit takes possession of a 
synod or a convention, and the rights of the 
minority are trampled under foot, and harsh 
judgments are rushed through, not by the 
force of reason but by the terrorism of the 
multitude, what name do we give to such an 
operation ? It is not, surely, a sacred per- 
formance, even though it may take place in 
the very presence of the altar. 

On the other hand, when an employer of 
men writes me, as one did a few weeks ago, 
" I have not reduced the wages of my men 
during the depression. There was a time 
when I was profiting largely by their work ; 
now that it is otherwise I do not mean 
to forget what I owe them," — is that what 
you call a secular proceeding? And when 
a public-school teacher tells me of a boy in 
one of her classes whose habits and tenden- 
cies were thoroughly bad, but over whom 
she has succeeded in establishing an influ- 



116 THE SACRED AND THE SECULAR. 

ence by kind treatment, by appeals to his 
manliness, until now he seems to be well 
started in the better way, shall I tell this 
young woman that work of this kind is 
merely secular ? And when a prophet of 
God, in this dispensation, rises up and in 
the name of Jehovah smites the most gigan- 
tic aggregation of political injustice and cor- 
ruption ever heaped together in one place 
upon this planet, and scatters it to the four 
winds of heaven, making a free space on 
which to build a government that shall be a 
shelter and not a terror to the people, — a 
shrine and not a slaughter-house, — shall 
we call him a secular preacher, and cry out 
that the function of the pulpit is not the 
preaching of politics, but the saving of 
souls ? 

In truth, there is no kind of work in 
which any man has a right to engage that is 
not in its deepest meaning sacred work. 
What is the farmer's work ? He is devel- 
oping the powers of the earth ; he is caus- 
ing it to bring forth and bud, that it may 



THE SACRED AND THE SECULAR. 117 

give seed to the sower and bread to the 
eater ; he is working together with God. 
What is the work of the miner? He is 
bringing forth from the treasures of the 
earth the stores of wealth that God has 
been keeping there for his children ; he is a 
co-worker with God. What is the work of 
the artisan or the manufacturer ? He is 
shaping the products of mine or field or for- 
est for human uses ; he is a co-worker with 
God. What is the merchant's work? He 
is bringing the goods that supply human 
needs to the places where they are needed ; 
he is the helper of the farmer and the man- 
ufacturer ; with them, he is a co-worker with 
God. What is the work of the teacher ? 
In a more direct and conscious way he is 
working with God ; for, if he have any ade- 
quate idea of the meaning of his calling, he 
knows that it is not merely or mainly for 
bread-winning that he is training these 
pupils, but that he is seeking to develop 
their essential manhood and womanhood, — 
to enable each one of them to become what 



118 THE SACRED AND THE SECULAR, 

God meant him to be. What is the work 
of the physician ? It is to make man, in 
the words of the Great Physician, " every 
whit whole." Is not he, too, working to- 
gether with God? And what is the law- 
yer's function ? Is it not, primarily, the right 
administration of the laws ? And what are 
these laws of the state ? Are they not in 
their final intention, in their deepest pur- 
pose, the effort to secure justice and right- 
eousness among men ? And is not this the 
purpose of the divine government? Must 
not the lawyer, therefore, feel that, when he 
gets into the heart of his calling, his work 
must be essentially religious, — that he must 
be a co-worker with God ? 

" Each of the various functions that we 
fill," says Canon Fremantle, " is a priest- 
hood ; the service which we render in them 
is a holy sacrifice ; the materials which we 
employ are sacraments and signs of the spir- 
itual act within. The student who devotes 
himself to the acquisition of truth, whose 
prayer is that his mind may be sustained 



THE SACBED AND THE SECULAR. 119 

till lie has acquired the knowledge which 
it is his duty to seek, is ministering in a 
sacred office, and his writings, up from the 
simplest college essay or analysis to the 
highest product of genius, the outward 
working of his spirit within, are the em- 
blems and signs of his ministry. The 
trader who is determined to act honestly, 
and who is conscious that his trade is a 
means of benefit to others, and follows it 
with that object, is a minister of God for 
their good, and the commodities with which 
he deals are the outward sign of his honesty 
and his beneficence. The artist, whose ob- 
ject is beauty, is, by purifying and enno- 
bling our sense of beauty, doing service to 
God and man, and the works of his art are 
the media by which his service is rendered. 
... I need not point out that the same is 
true in the family, where every father is a 
priest by a kind of natural consecration ; 
nor in the state, where every ruler is a min- 
ister of God for our good. The great want 
of our age is that we should look at all these 



120 THE SACRED AND THE SECULAR, 

functions, not as profane and secular, accord- 
ing to the heathen and Jewish idea which 
Christ came to banish, but as those in 
which the service of Christ preeminently 
lies. There is the true sacrifice, there the 
living priesthood ; there is the sacrament of 
our union, the real presence and the body of 
Christ our Lord." ^ 

That all these common functions and 
callings are, when rightly understood and 
rightly performed, in the deepest sense 
sacred, is a fundamental truth of Christian- 
ity, yet it is a truth which has waited long 
for general recognition. Like the truth of 
the fatherhood of God and the truth of the 
brotherhood of man, it has been understood 
by a few in all . the ages, and uncertainly 
and feebly held by the church at large, but 
its real meaning and significance have been 
practically hidden. Every one would say 
that the farmer ought to be a religious 
man ; that is to say, he ought to keep the 
Sabbath, and go to church, and have family 

1 The Gospel of the Secular Life, pp. 190, 191. 



THE SACRJED AND THE SECULAR. 121 

prayers, and ask a blessing at the table, and 
be a devout and prayerful person every day; 
but that his work itself, — his plowing and 
sowing and reaping is in itself cooperation 
with God, and ought to be a conscious and 
a joyful cooperation ; that his work ought 
to be full of the spirit of worship, — how 
often has he heard any such truth as this ? 
So with all the other lawful callings which 
men follow. The common conception is that 
they furnish simply a means of livelihood ; 
they are just secular^ that word tells it all ; 
in the words of the dictionary, they are " dis- 
sociated from, or have no concern with re- 
ligious, spiritual, or sacred matters or uses." 
That they can be thought of and used as 
sacramental, — as the expression of love and 
loyalty to God, — this, I say, is not a famil- 
iar conception. It ought to become familiar. 
What an infinite pity it is that men cannot 
gain some sense of the dignity and divine- 
ness of common life ! What a meaning is 
imparted to existence when we are able to 
see that in all the lowliest paths of human 



122 THE SACBED AND THE SECULAB. 

service we are literally walking and work- 
ing with God ! Was not the poet's aim a 
noble one when he cried, — 

" By words 
Which speak of nothing more than what we are 
Would I arouse the sensual from their sleep 
Of death, and win the vacant and the vain 
To noble raptures "? 

It is not needful to speak of more than 
what we are, — of more than what the hum- 
blest honest worker in the world is, and 
should know himself to be ; that simple 
statement has enough inspiration in it to 
make the most prosaic life heroic and sub- 
lime. 

And this, if I understand the matter, is 
what Christ meant when he said, " I came 
to save the world." He came to make all 
life divine. He came to bring us into such 
conscious nearness to God, into such living 
fellowship with Him, that we should be able 
to discern God's purpose in all our work, 
and to link our wills with his in a perpetual 
consecration, believing that whether we eat 



THE SACRED AND THE SECULAR, 123 

or drink, or whatever we do, we are doing 
all to his glory. 

This new conception of Christianity is 
beginning to find expression in churches of 
a new type, with a greatly broadened min- 
istry. There lies before me, as 1 write, the 
picture of a new and noble edifice recently 
erected in a Western city, and with it a full 
account of the kind of work which this 
church proposes to carry on, in the forty-two 
rooms that are covered by its roof. The 
contrast between the sacred and the secular 
finds no sanction here. For here, in addi- 
tion to the ordinary provisions for public 
worship, are large facilities for interests that 
are usually regarded as secular. Here is a 
gymnasium, for physical culture and athletic 
training ; here is the offer of a bicycle club, 
an athletic club, and a camera club, for out- 
door pleasures ; here are educational and in- 
dustrial classes of various sorts : instruction 
in music, instrumental and vocal ; in lan- 
guages ; in applied science, electricity, and 
microscopy ; in commercial arithmetic and 



124 THE SACEED AND THE SECULAR. 

bookkeeping and penmanship ; in mechan- 
ical and architectural drawing ; in milli- 
nery ; in white sewing ; in dressmaking and 
in cooking ; and a fine arts club, and a tour- 
ist club, and a reading-room, and recreation- 
rooms, with literary and debating societies ; 
while lectures, concerts, and other entertain- 
ments complete for the present a pro- 
gramme which will undoubtedly be ex- 
tended from year to year. For all these 
forms of work and enjoyment, this building, 
whose plan is before me, makes ample pro- 
vision. There are rooms here, numerous, 
commodious, beautiful, in which this work 
may be carried forward. The church opens 
these hospitable doors, and expects and de- 
sires that the people of its neighborhood, 
rich and poor, will freely avail themselves 
not only of its privileges of worship, but of 
all these facilities of instruction and recre- 
ation. And it is a church that is doing all 
this, — a Christian church. And it is doing 
this because it is Christian, through and 
through ; because it has entered into the 



THE SACRED AND THE SECULAR. 125 

mind of Christ more intimately than most 
churches do ; because it understands what 
He meant when He said, " I came to save 
the world." 

It may be surmised that these various ad- 
ditions to the equipment of this church are 
intended merely, or at any rate chiefly, as 
attractions, — as baits ; that their purpose is 
to draw the people into the building, and 
thus give the ministers and the evangelistic 
workers a chance to convert them. It is to 
be hoped, indeed, that a great many of those 
who come will find something a little better 
than they came for ; some new view of the 
meaning of life, which will lead them out 
into a completer manhood and womanhood, 
— into the liberty of the glory of the sons of 
God. But after all, the idea that these fea- 
tures of the life of this church are simply 
introduced as lures does not, I think, at all 
represent the facts of the case. 

The gymnasium has its place in this plan 
because physical health and strength are 
sacred possessions, gifts which God wishes 



126 THE SACBED AND THE SECULAR. 

and works to bestow on all his children. It 
is because this church aims to be a co-worker 
with God that it furnishes the gymnasium. 
The recreation-rooms and the clubs for out- 
door sports are furnished for the same rea- 
son, because in God's plan rest must alter- 
nate with work, and recreation follow mental 
strain. This is not a secular provision ; it 
is part of the divine order ; and the church 
recognizes it and treats it as such. The 
classes for industrial education are offered 
because work before play is the divine or- 
dinance ; and the training which enables a 
man to work intelligently and skillfully is 
preparing him to fulfill the high calling of 
God. The laws of physics and mechanics, 
which underlie this industrial education, are 
only the ways in which God works ; and the 
better a man understands God's ways and 
the more perfectly he conforms to them, the 
happier and the more successful he will be 
in every industrial calling. Of the sciences, 
which are to be taught in this place, exactly 
the same thing must be said, — the student 



THE SACRED AND THE SECULAR. 127 

of every science is only thinking God's 
thoughts after Him. Shall we call the study 
of science a secular avocation ? And the 
music which is taught here, — are the voices 
with which it speaks to the spirit secular 
voices? Doubtless music, and all the arts, 
may be perverted to a degree which shall re- 
quire a much stronger word than secular to 
describe their baseness ; the best things can 
be most desecrated ; but rightly ministered, 
music becomes the vehicle of the purest and 
loftiest emotions, — the only language that 
can express the aspiration of the soul that 
thirsts for God, or the rapture of the bea- 
tific vision. 

And what shall we say of the large provi- 
sion made for social intercourse, — for the 
bringing of the people of the neighborhood 
together in kindly and fraternal relations, — 
that they may look each other in the face, 
take each other by the hand, and manifest to 
each other the goodwill which springs in the 
hearts of all who have learned of Christ? 
Is this a secular enterprise ? Is the strength- 



128 THE SACEED AND THE SECULAR, 

ening of the ties of friendship among neigh- 
bors a secular business ? What will be the 
signs of the presence of the kingdom of 
heaven when it has fully come? Will they 
be anything other or better than peace on 
earth and goodwill among men ? And is the 
work of the church in promoting on earth 
these heavenly relations anything less than 
sacred ? 

No ; these instrumentalities, somewhat un- 
usual in the equipment of a Christian church, 
are not furnished in any furtive fashion — as 
a kind of Christian cajolery to entrap and 
convert souls ; they are provided for what 
they are worth in themselves ; they are in- 
cluded as representing essential elements in 
the development and manifestation of the 
Christian life ; they are offered because this 
church has gained a new conception of what 
Christ meant when he said, " I came to save 
the world." They are in this plan because 
this church has felt the meaning of such stir- 
ring words as these of Professor Drummond : 

" The nearer one draws to reality, the 



THE SACRED AND THE SECULAR. 129 

nearer one draws to the working sphere of 
religion. Wherever real life is, there Christ 
goes. And He goes there, not only because 
the great need lies there, but because there 
is found, so to speak, the raw material with 
which Christianity works, — the life of man. 
To do something with this, to infuse some- 
thing into this, to save and inspire and sanc- 
tify this, the active working life of the world, 
is what He came for. Without human life 
to act upon, without the relations of men 
with one another, of master with servant, 
husband with wife, buyer with seller, creditor 
with debtor, there is no such thing as Chris- 
tianity. With actual things, with humanity 
in its every-day dress, with the traffic of the 
streets, with gates and houses, with work and 
wages, with sin and poverty, with these 
things^ and all the things and all the rela- 
tions and all the people of the city, Chris- 
tianity has to do, and has more to do than 
with anything else. To conceive of the 
Christian religion as itself a thing, — a some- 
thing which can exist apart from life ; to 




130 THE SACRED AND THE SECULAR. 

think of it as sometliing added on to being, 
something kept in a separate compartment 
called the soul, as an extra accomplishment 
like music, or a special talent like art, is to- 
tally to misapprehend its nature. It is that 
which fills all compartments. It is that 
which makes the whole life music and every 
separate action a work of art. Take away 
action, and it is not. Take away people, 
houses, streets, character, and it ceases to be. 
Without these there may be sentiment, or 
rapture, or adoration, or superstition ; there 
may even be religion — but there can never 
the religion of the Son of Man." ^ 
'Ajid yet it must not be supposed that the 
other parts of this church are of no special 
value. I have dwelt upon its exceptional 
ap)pointments, because I desired to enforce 
tiJeir significance and their sacredness ; but 
the ordinary provision for worship, for the 
study of God's truth, for those acts and ex- 
ercises which are the largest part of the life 
of all Christian churches, is not, in any 
1 The City without a Church, pp. 12, 14. 



V 



THE SACRED AND THE SECULAR. 131 

thought of mine, disparaged. The worship 
of such a church will be, indeed, less than 
nothing and vanity unless its life permeates 
and sanctifies all these common things ; but 
when its life does permeate and sanctify all 
these common things, then its sanctuary 
will be crowded and its prayer-rooms full to 
overflowing. When men begin to under- 
stand that they are walking and working 
with God six days in the week, when they 
comprehend that they have actual fellow- 
ship with the Father and with his son Jesus 
Christ in the humblest tasks to which they 
devote their powers, then they will find in 
the Sabbath worship a meaning which they 
have never known before. When the ath- 
lete, in the sanctified gymnasium, stands face 
to face with the fact that his body is the 
temple of the living God, he will feel it to 
be an unseemly thing if from that temple 
the incense of prayer never ascends to God. 
When the student, under the roof that shel- 
ters the altar, realizes that all his studies are 
but efforts to interpret the eternal Reason, 



132 THE SACRED AND THE SECULAR. 

his reverence must awaken a desire to know 
more fully the Being whose ways are thus 
in part revealed to him. 

No, it cannot be that the realization of 
the sacredness of all life will rob our hearts 
of reverence or silence the voices of our 
praise. We must all come, led by a com- 
mon impulse, to the altar of God, to God 
our exceeding joy, to pour out our hearts 
before Him, to confess our unworthiness of 
so great love, and to pray for the light and 
truth that shall lead us in his ways. When 
every calling is a priesthood, when every 
task is a prayer, the church bell will have a 
music in its peal that our ears have never 
heard. " Those," says Canon Fremantle, 
" who acknowledge that the sanction which 
makes their work a noble service is the be- 
lief in God, will want to hear more about 
God, and will return to theology and its 
teachings with a new zest." Thus there is 
reason to hope that the weekly assemblies of 
such a church will be thronged with earnest 
seekers after God, with men and women 



THE SACREB AND THE SECULAR, 133 

whose deepest wish is to know his will more 
perfectly, and to come into closer fellowship 
with Him. 

Such a concrete example as this church 
furnishes — and there are not a few like it 
in the land — brings before us more clearly 
than much theorizing could do the nature of 
the changes which are taking place in the 
minds of men respecting the false distinction 
so long maintained between things sacred 
and things secular. I am persuaded that 
the new conception gives to religion a dig- 
nity and power which it has not known, 
and that it will greatly hasten the progress 
of the kingdom of God. 



VI. 

THE LAW OF PROPERTY. 



Within the spheres of private industry and personal 
endeavor much service may be rendered in binding some 
men happily together : and in these relations there is 
no social obligation more constant or more imperative. 
Every manufacturer, every business man, has opportu- 
nity and divine calling within his own private business to 
serve the highest interests of society. The social obliga- 
tions of men to men in their industries are not to be left 
out of the account, as though they belonged only to some 
conscienceless and loveless domain of economics, and not 
to the world of God's love. Whatever in the conduct of 
private business experience commends as profitable to 
prevent the proletarizing of a laboring class becomes an 
ethical responsibility and a Christian duty of the admin- 
istrator and the capitalist. — Newman Smyth, Christian 
Ethics^ page 463. 

Now all her standards were spiritualized. She had come 
to know what happiness and affection are possible in three 
rooms, or two, on twenty-eight shillings a week ; and, 
on the other hand, her knowledge of Aldous — a man of 
stoical and simple habit, thrust, with a student's tastes, 
into the position of a great landowner — had shown her, 
in the case at least of one member of the rich class, how 
wealth may be a true moral burden and test, the source 
of half the difficulties and pains — of half the nobleness 
also — of a man's life. . . . She had ceased to think of 
whole classes of civilized society with abhorrence and con- 
tempt ; and there had dawned in her that temper which 
is in truth implied in all ^he more majestic conceptions 
of the state — the temper that regards the main institu- 
tions of every great civilization, whether it be property, 
or law, or religious custom, as necessarily, in some degree, 
divine and sacred. For man has not been their sole arti- 
ficer ! Throughout there has been working within him 
" the spark that fires our clay." — Mrs. Humphry 
Ward, Marcella, ii. 487-489. 



VI. 

THE LAW OF PROPERTY. 

The moral education of the race has not 
been a gradual process, nor has it gone on 
by logical or ideal methods ; there has been 
a great want of symmetry and apparent co- 
herency in the movement ; its course does 
not resemble the skillfully chosen line of the 
canal, but the devious channel of the river. 
If any social philosopher had planned the 
moral progress of humanity, it would have 
gone forward in a very different way. The 
anomalies and inconsistencies which appear 
at every stage of this progress would, of 
course, have been avoided. The logical ab- 
surdity of permitting this, while condemning 
that, would have been pointed out, and the 
race would have been taught that it was 
better to be symmetrically bad than unsym- 
metrically good. 



138 THE LAW OF PROPERTY. 

There is reason, however, to doubt whether 
the pedagogy of the moral philosophers 
would have been more effective than that 
which has been conducted ; perhaps the 
indirect and tentative methods of Provi- 
dence are better calculated to reach sure 
results than the clever contrivances of men. 

We are struck, in studying the moral 
education of the people who are, by com- 
mon consent, the ethical leaders of the race, 
with the way in which moral conceptions 
were slowly naturalized among them. The 
great truth toward which they were to be 
led was the sacredness of all life ; but the 
first step in that direction was the consecra- 
tion of some small portion of life. To have 
told these people the whole truth would have 
been inexpedient ; they could not receive it ; 
a partial revelation was the only possible 
revelation. Some little part of life was 
separated from the rest and brought under 
the law of consecration. When they had 
learned something of the principle of conse- 
cration in this limited field, the time would 



THE LAW OF PROPERTY. 139 

come when it could be extended to wider 
realms. 

The method, after all, commends itself to 
our judgment. When a small colony takes 
possession of a continent yet uncultivated, 
it is necessary that its first attempts to sub- 
due the land be concentrated within narrow 
inclosures. The fact that the labor of the 
colonists is bestowed on a very few acres is 
no indication that their purposes may not 
include the land outside their fences. From 
these few acres as a base of operations they 
can extend their cultivation. The attempt 
to cover the whole continent the first year 
would not be practicable. And if the moral 
education of the Hebrew race began with 
the reclamation of some small tracts of con- 
duct, the method was probably adapted to 
the intellectual condition of the people. 

Thus, in the olden time, men were re- 
quired to fast on certain days. Beyond a 
doubt, the ulterior purpose of this fasting 
was the control of the appetite, — the cultiva- 
tion of temperance in the Scripture sense of 



140 THE LAW OF PROPERTY. 

the word. It would not have been possible 
to teach these people to rule their appetites 
every day, and at every meal ; to make rea- 
son the arbiter of their dietary. But if 
occasional days were set apart, upon which, 
under severe penalties, they were forbidden 
to eat at all, they would learn, under this 
discipline, the lesson that the will could con- 
trol the appetite, and this lesson could by 
and by be expanded into a broader prin- 
ciple. 

In the old times certain localities were 
made sacred. The presence of God was to 
be looked for in those sacred places ; it was 
only there that He could be approached. 
This localization of worship seems to us a 
crude method ; but perhaps the mind could 
not have been concentrated upon the 
thought of God without the aid of these 
associations of locality. Do we not all feel 
the influence of such associations upon our 
own spirits in quieting and elevating our 
thoughts ? It was only by that communion 
with God which was thus promoted that 



THE LAW OF PROPERTY, 141 

men were enabled to entertain the larger 
conception of his presence as filling all 
space. The time at length arrived when 
Jesus could say to the woman of Sychar : 
" Believe me, the hour cometh when neither 
in this mountain nor in Jerusalem shall 
ye worship the Father. The hour cometh, 
and now is, when the true worshipers shall 
worship the Father in spirit and in truth, 
for such doth the Father seek to be his wor- 
shipers." 

A still more striking illustration of the 
partialness of the rudiments of morality 
among the Hebrews is the legislation in- 
tended to restrict the old custom of blood 
vengeance. By that custom the accidental 
as well as the intentional homicide was 
doomed to death by the slain man's next 
of kin. It was the religious duty of the 
avenger of blood to take the life of one 
who, by the merest accident, had slain his 
kinsman. Now the Levitical law does not 
forbid such vengeance, albeit it is nothing 
less than murder. It merely regulates this 



142 THE LAW OF PROPEBTY. 

passion. It provides cities of refuge, to 
which the accidental slayer may flee. If 
the avenger of blood can overtake him be- 
fore he reaches the city of refuge, he is 
authorized by the law to kill him. If the 
slayer comes forth from his asylum at any 
time before the death of the high priest who 
was in office when the accident took place, 
the avenger of blood may kill him. Not till 
this high priest dies is he free to go forth 
and be protected by the law from the 
avenger of blood. So feeble in those old 
times was the sense of the sacredness of 
human life, so strong was the impulse of an 
irrational vengeance. To our moral sense 
the wrath of the avenger of blood seems 
only the impulse of a brute. Yet it is not 
prohibited; it is only moderated. Certain 
conditional safeguards are provided for the 
accidental slayer. These are designed to 
suggest to the seeker of vengeance that his 
passion needs restraint. The idea is insinu- 
ated into his mind that human life is too 
sacred to be the prey of mere insensate fury. 



THE LAW OF PROPERTY. 143 

To the wild beast in him the law sets metes 
and bounds, saying, Thus far, and no far- 
ther. And doubtless this very legislation 
did tend to check blood vengeance, and to 
cultivate in the Hebrew mind the true ethi- 
cal idea respecting human life. 

It was precisely in this way that the doc- 
trine of property was taught in those early 
times. The consecration of their posses- 
sions to God was, as the Hebrews under- 
stood it, a very partial consecration. One 
tenth of what they had rightfully belonged 
to God, the other nine tenths belonged to 
themselves. That was the provision of 
their law. Doubtless it was a wise provi- 
sion. The thin end of the wedge must be 
used in riving i^he covetousness of the hu- 
man heart. If men could be trained to 
regard one tenth of their gains as belonging 
to their Maker and set apart for holy uses, 
that was as much, probably^ as they would 
willingly yield. The principle was estab- 
lished that their property was not all their 
own ; that other motives than those of self- 



144 THE LAW OF PROPERTY. 

interest must control the disposition of a 
portion of it. As they learned the doctrine 
of the divine omnipresence by the consecra- 
tion of sacred places ; as their first lessons 
in keeping fast days led them on toward the 
virtue of self-control ; as the restrictive reg- 
ulations about homicide taught them the 
sacredness of human life ; so these very rudi- 
mentary lessons in the consecration of prop- 
perty prepared the way for that larger 
conception which Christianity was to intro- 
duce, under which the man who gives him- 
self to God no longer considers that any 
portion of his estate, be it nine tenths or 
one tenth, is left out of the transaction. 

I am not denying that there may be many 
persons in these days to whom the Jewish 
rule would be a helpful rule. So little 
conception have they of the real relation 
between themselves and the Father of their 
spirits, so utterly far away and foreign does 
He seem to the affairs of their e very-day 
lives, that they cannot bring themselves to 
recognize any real partnership with Him in 



THE LAW OF PROPERTY. 145 

things which they designate as secular. 
Religion, as they understand it, is in inter- 
est wholly separate from business. The 
motives which hold sway in the one realm 
are spiritual motives, and those which hold 
sway in the other realm are secular motives. 
Their relations with God are wholly on the 
religious side of their lives ; the world is 
a region with which He has nothing to do. 
When they desire to commune with God, 
they leave the world behind them ; " what 
part has He," they ask, "in those purely 
secular affairs ? We shall offend Him if 
we bring any thought of them into the sanc- 
tuary." Much less is there any place for 
Him and the high and holy affections which 
He inspires in that workday world, with 
whose business for six sevenths of our time 
we must be engrossed. 

To one who habitually regards all the 
great and absorbing interests of life, and 
especially those interests which have to do 
with property, as secular and not sacred, the 
proposition to take one tenth part of these 



146 THE LAW OF PROPEBTY, 

interests over into the other realm and con- 
secrate them to God, is in the line of 
progress. The man who acknowledges the 
divine control of one tenth of his property- 
is nearer right than the man who thinks 
that his property is all exclusively his own, 
and that the divine purpose has nothing 
to do with the disposition of it. The idea 
of stewardship has found a lodgment in his 
mind. The leaven is there ; perhaps it will 
gradually affect the whole lump. 

The Jewish rule of consecration may 
therefore be a very good practical rule for 
many persons in these days who profess and 
call themselves Christians, just as there may 
be many who would be profited by abstain- 
ing from food periodically, as a reminder to 
their unruly appetites that reason ought to 
control them. But the rudimentary Jewish 
rule ought not to be considered as the suffi- 
cient rule of Christians in this day of grace. 
For even as the law of fasting was the first 
step in the path to a control of all the bodily 
appetites, and as the recognition of sacred 



THE LAW OF PROPERTY. 147 

places led to the knowledge of the truth that 
the whole earth is the temple of the living 
God, and as the checking of the avenger's 
fury at the gates of the city of refuge opened 
to him the truth that the life of man is pre- 
cious in the sight of God, so this institution 
of the tithe was the initial stage in that dis- 
cipline by which men were to be taught 
that all their property is rightly held only 
as a trust from the Infinite Goodness. 

A clear-minded and conscientious man, 
who had been reading a certain book, said 
to me not long ago, " That chapter on prop- 
erty I cannot understand. The definition 
by Dr. Brownson, of which a good deal is 
made, conveys no idea to my mind. ' Prop- 
erty is communion with God through the 
material world.' I do not know what that 
means." I had no time to finish the conver- 
sation, but the remark has often recurred to 
me. There must be something inadequate 
about the phrase, or else my friend would 
have got some meaning out of it. Per- 
haps the word " communion," with its litur- 



148 THE LAW OF PROPERTY. 

gical association, was the stumbling-block. 
But the very first definition of communion, 
in the latest dictionary, is " participation 
in something held in common ; fellowship." 
Partnership would come nearer to conveying 
the legal meaning ; but I dare say that the 
theologian who framed the definition wished 
to keep as far away as possible from concep- 
tions purely legal, and to emphasize the spir- 
itual facts in the case, and therefore wrote 
'' communion " rather than " partnership." 
But it seems to me that there ought to be no 
difficulty in entertaining the idea that we do, 
in very deed, through all our use of material 
things, enter into fellowship with God. To 
one who believes that God is immanent in 
nature ; that all the natural forces are only 
modes of his activity ; that all living things 
live and move and have their being in Him, 
the idea cannot be very remote that we 
never touch the material world without 
coming into vital relations with Him. What- 
ever we may have honestly accumulated, be 
the same little or much, we have gained by 



THE LAW OF PROPERTY. 149 

cooperating with Him. If our wealth has 
been won by developing the natural resources 
of the earth, we have been using his power 
every day. If it is the fruit of honest trade, 
our success has depended wholly on the ob- 
servance and use of those social laws which 
He has impressed upon the human race. He 
has made men for society ; He has made 
them to be members one of another and to 
help one another ; and honest trade is no- 
thing but a mutual exchange of services, by 
which the welfare of all is increased. The 
social laws which underlie all exchanges are 
the expression of the divine purpose con- 
cerning man ; and he who makes good use 
of them, if he understands what he is about, 
knows that he is in fellowship with God. 

Not otherwise is it with any productive or 
useful occupation. I do not say with every 
occupation, for there is much that men call 
work which is not worthy to bear that sa- 
cred name. A man may be, many a man is, 
in his daily employment fighting against 
God. He who seeks to aggrandize himself 



150 THE LAW OF PROPEBTY. 

by perverting the powers of nature, by turn- 
ing her wholesome fruits to poisons, by 
contriving ministries to depraved appetites, 
by pandering to destructive vices, by em- 
ploying the forces of the earth to promote 
the degradation of men, is, in his habitual ac- 
tivity, in deadly enmity against God. The 
gains which he thus accumulates are not in 
any true sense property. The laws may 
recognize his title to them, for laws are not 
always able to express the essential right- 
eousness ; they are only approximations to 
the standard which, in our hearts, we accept. 
We are compelled to administer our juris- 
prudence in a manner which corresponds 
but roughly to the ideal of justice. But 
the possessions which a man has won by such 
practices as I have described are much more 
properly regarded as spoils or booty. They 
are the fruit of an insidious and destructive 
warfare against humanity. 

Equally hostile to all divine fellowship is 
the work which sets at nought the truth of 
human brotherhood, and uses men as count- 



THE LAW OF PROPERTY, 151 

ers in the game of life, or as tools in the 
building of fortune. There are many to 
whom the problem of life is the exploitation 
of their neighbors. There are many to 
whom business and politics are simply a 
struggle for mastery, with woe to the van- 
quished. The brother man by their side is a 
stepping-stone for the ambitious to mount 
by ; if they would rather not prostrate him 
in the process, it is mainly because while he 
is erect they can mount higher by standing 
on his shoulders. But the warfare of inter- 
est is relentless ; the contestant counts all 
whom he employs or with whom he deals 
as lawful prey : his problem is to get from 
his fellow-men as much as he can, and to 
give them as little as he can ; what becomes 
of them is a question that he does not per- 
mit himself to consider. Do not understand 
that I am ascribing purposes like these to 
all the men in the active contests of life : 
that would be a gross slander. I am not 
willing to admit that the majority of the 
men with whom we come in contact are of 



152 THE LAW OF PROPERTY. 

this character : my impression is that the 
humane and the honorable and the fair are 
in the ascendant, both in numbers and in 
power. But it would be idle to try to con- 
ceal from ourselves the terrible truth that 
there are thousands among us who are ready 
to enrich or aggrandize themselves by poi- 
soning the very sources of the national life. 
For the love of money, how many there are 
who will offer bribes, and thus help to break 
down the honor and integrity of voters and 
officials ; and how many, on the other side, 
who will accept bribes, and use places 
of public trust for their own emolument. 
What fearful inroads are thus made upon 
the national virtue by imscrupulous wealth 
and wolfish ambition. 

And there are many others, who push 
their industrial and commercial combina- 
tions in a manner so selfish, so oppressive, 
so tyrannical, that their whole work tends 
to destroy the sympathy and goodwill which 
makes society possible. So reckless are 
they of the rights of competitors and em- 



TUE LAW OF PROPERTY. 153 

ployees, so bent on crushing rivalry and 
elevating themselves upon the ruins of other 
fortunes, that their whole path through life 
is strewn with blasted hopes and marked by 
desolated homes ; and the only flowers that 
bloom by the wayside over which they have 
passed are the nettles and the brambles of 
resentment and ill-will. Dire and deadly is 
the work of these destroyers. The social 
conditions which they engender must be 
such as will tend to the disintegration of 
the social tissue and to the downfall of the 
social order. 

It is hardly necessary to say that those 
whose work, however useful it might be in 
itself, is prosecuted in this spirit, are not 
working with God ; that they are simply 
laboring to pull down and destroy the work 
of God upon the earth. For even as there 
is no more real fellowship with God than 
that which the man rightfully enjoys who Is 
doing good work with a good will, so there 
is no kind of opposition to God which is 
more positive or malignant than that of the 



154 THE LAW OF PROPERTY, 

man who is using natural forces or social 
opportunities in such a way as to degrade 
his fellow-men, or to weaken the bond of 
confidence and mutual regard by which they 
are held together in society. The man who 
blasphemes and denies God is not so dan- 
gerous a foe as the man who, it may be with 
pious words upon his lips, is building up his 
fortunes by methods which naturally involve 
the hardening of his neighbors' hearts, the 
ruin of their souls, and the increase of ill- 
will among men. To speak of property 
thus gained as in any sense sacramental — 
as the medium through which the man holds 
communion with God — would be little bet- 
ter than blasphemy. 

But the great majority of our neighbors, 
as I have said, are animated by no such 
unsocial purposes. They are often more 
thoughtless than they ought to be of the 
welfare of those with whom they deal, but 
their honest intention is on the whole be- 
nevolent ; they desire to live and let live ; 
they would cry out with the poet : — 



THE LAW OF PROPERTY. 155 

" Rich through my brethren's poverty ? 
Such wealth were hideous : I am blest 
Only in what they share with me, 
In what I share with all the rest." 

And those who are carrying on an honest 
work in a spirit truly social are surely, in a 
most real sense, working together with God. 
Their gains have been made by entering 
into his designs, by thinking his thoughts 
after Him, by using the instruments and 
powers which He has furnished to their 
hands. The " Silent Partner " in all their 
labor has been the great Creator. Every 
day of their lives his presence has been with 
them, and his omnipotence has been the 
fund of power on which they have steadily 
drawn. The genial warmth of the sun- 
beams, the nourishing moisture of the earth, 
the unfailing pull of gravitation that moves 
the river currents downward, the rush of the 
compelling vapor, the heat of the coal, the 
energy of the electric spark, are all parts 
of his ways, witnesses to the ever present 
might of Him without whom we can do 



156 THE LAW OF PEOPEBTY, 

nothing. And wlien one has, in some good 
measure, accepted His wisdom as the guide 
of his endeavors, and has said, in humble 
recognition of His right to rule our lives, — 

" Our wills are ours, we know not how, 
Our wills are ours to make them thine," 

must not the truth that property is com- 
munion with God through the material 
world become a very real thought to him ? 
Will he have any difficulty in understand- 
ing that the gains which he has made, be 
they more or less, have been made in a life- 
long partnership with the Author of his be- 
ing ? To dispute it would be like the June 
garden proclaiming that with all its wealth 
of color the light had had nothing to do, 
or like the rainbow denying that the sun 
and the shower had any part in building its 
glowing arch. 

So deeply seated in the very foundations 
of our ethical and spiritual being are the 
rights of property. Of all these profound 
conceptions jurisprudence can take no no- 
tice ; that part of our being by which we 



THE LAW OF PEOPEETY. 157 

are allied to God is beyond the reach of 
jurisprudence. Yet it is in these deep con- 
ceptions that we must always find the guid- 
ing lights of conduct. It is only when we 
realize our relations to the Power which is 
behind all phenomena that we know what 
duty means, and what are the true defini- 
tions of our rights. 

If, then, I have anything that is right- 
fully mine, it is because He who gave me 
personality has been aiding me to realize 
my personality in the possession and use of 
material things. Nothing is mine apart 
from Him ; everything that I rightly call 
my own I am holding and using with a 
reverent regard for his holy will. 

When this conception gets naturalized in 
one's mind, and his habitual thinking ad- 
justs itself to it, the old discussions about 
tithes will have been left very far behind. 
There is no need of taking a fraction, 
greater or less, and consecrating it to the 
service of the kingdom; the fundamental 
assumption is that it all is consecrated. 



158 THE LAW OF PROPEBTY. 

When the man reflects on how he came 
by it, he cannot set up any exclusive claim 
to it. The rights of the Silent Partner can 
never be ignored. And the question how 
this property can be dispensed is a question 
which can never be discussed without con- 
stant reference to the heavenly Father's 
will. 

It may be supposed that such a concep- 
tion would call for the bestowment of all 
we have in almsgiving and charitable work. 
But this by no means follows. I can con- 
ceive that a man might not give one dollar 
in what is known as charity, and yet might 
use his whole wealth in consecrated minis- 
tries. If a man employs his capital in busi- 
ness, and makes the law of that business the 
law of service, — seeking to make it useful 
in every way to those whom he supplies and 
to those whom he employs, seeking to fill 
all his relations to his associates and his 
neighbors with the spirit of Christ, — that 
dispensation of his property may be the 
most perfect form of communion with God 



THE LAW OF PROPERTY. 169 

which he could possibly devise. I do not 
believe that any more charitable, any more 
divine use of money can be thought of than 
that which is involved in the furnishing of 
honest and healthful work, and in the mani- 
festation, through the friendships which as- 
sociation in work makes possible, of the true 
spirit of brotherly love. The man who can 
gather men about him in some productive 
industry, and can thus enable them by their 
own labor to earn a decent livelihood, and 
can fill all his relations with them with the 
spirit of Christ, making it plain to them 
that he is studying to befriend and help 
them in every possible way, is doing quite 
as much, I think, to realize God's purpose 
with respect to property, and to bring heaven 
to earth, as if he were founding an asylum 
or endowing a tract society. 

There are those who conceive that any 
man of wealth whose will is in harmony 
with God's will must needs give a great 
deal right and left to all who ask for it. 
But this is not clear. It should be remem- 



160 THE LAW OF PROPERTY. 

bered that He to whom the wealth of the 
world belongs does not dispense it in this 
way. It must be that He has the power to 
take the wealth of the rich from them and 
distribute it among the poor. Yet this is 
not done. There must be some good reason 
why it is not done. I think that any man 
who tries to give away much money, and 
who watches its effect upon the recipients, 
will find out the reason. It is the hardest 
thing in the world to do good with money. 
The lavish, unconsidered bestowal of it 
upon all who seem to be in need is a very 
injurious business. The harm that is done 
by such a dispensation far outweighs the 
good. And the man whose property brings 
him into communion with God, and who 
seeks to conform all his expenditure to the 
will of God, will often be constrained to 
check his lavish impulses, and to give only 
so much as shall serve to stimulate the 
manhood and arouse the self-respect of the 
recipient. 

It may be said that the conception of 



THE LAW OF PROPERTY. 161 

this discourse, that property is only rightly 
held and used when man's partnership with 
God is acknowledged, is too high and fine 
for ordinary human beings ; and that some 
less radical maxim would be more influen- 
tial. I do not think so. It seems to me 
that we cannot afford to place before our 
minds any rule except the perfect rule. 
When we are legislating for states, we must 
consult expediency; when we are settling 
the principles of our own conduct, we must 
confront the ideal. And I do not believe 
that this principle is too bright and good 
for human nature's daily food. Indeed, 
there are signs on every hand that many 
men, who make but little parade of religion, 
are waking up to a solemn sense of their 
responsibility for the use of their property 
and their social opportunities. The idea 
that God is in his world, that he is really 
here with us, every day, that we live and 
move and have our being in Him, that He is 
not, so to speak, a merely Sunday God or a 
God of the sanctuary and the altar and the 



162 THE LAW OF PROPERTY. 

closet, but an every-day Friend, Companion, 
Counselor, Partner, Helper, one with whom 
our relations are more constant and more 
intimate than they can be with any other 
being, — this idea is beginning to get hold 
of the minds of men ; and when they are 
once possessed by it, this will be a very 
beautiful world : its meanings will wonder- 
fully expand ; its horizons will widen ; and 
the azure overhead will bend down to us 
like a benediction. 



VII. 

RELIGION AND POLITICS. 



The elements which are manifest in the government of 
the nation, in its moral being, can have only a divine 
ground. The power which is in the people forming the 
nation is over the people ; and while the individual acts 
in the government of the nation, it is over the individual 
and he is subject to it ; and this is a power which is and 
can be in the nation only as it is a moral person and is 
derivative from God. This alone in government is the 
condition also of the reconciliation of law and freedom. 
The character of the authority of the nation also indi- 
cates its origin. It has authority, and is invested with 
power in the maintenance of a moral order on the earth. 
But the right thus to maintain authority over men be- 
longs in itself to no man and no collection of men, and 
is existent in the nation only as it has a divine gen- 
esis. . . . The ruler who recognizes and follows only the 
popular voice and the popular opinion becomes himself a 
slave. And he only is truly a ruler and truly free who 
recognizes in the sovereignty of the nation this divine 
source of its unity and power, and whose action in it is 
therefore in immediate responsibility to God. — Elisha 
MuLFORD, The Nation, chapter iv. 

Government, like man himself, participates of the di- 
vine being, and, derived from God through the people, it 
at the same time participates of human reason and will, 
thus reconciling authority with freedom, stability with 
progress. — Orestes A. Brownson, The American Re- 
public, page 126. 



VII. 

RELIGION AND POLITICS. 

When the line of division is run through 
life between things sacred and things secu- 
lar, politics is always found on the secular 
side. In the common conception, that realm 
of human conduct is essentially and hope- 
lessly profane. It may be admitted that 
there are good men in politics, but it is al- 
most an axiom that politics themselves are 
irretrievably bad. I think that the average 
citizen feels that public life is in its very 
nature unholy; that any one who permits 
himself to be entangled with the affairs of 
state is by that contact almost sure to be 
defiled. If men do keep themselves pure 
in that service, it is by heroic resistance 
against evil tendencies, which are not only 
inseparable from it, but which are elements 
of the work itself. Of course it is not any 



166 BELIGION AND POLITICS. 

deep or serious thinking that comes to such 
conclusions, but the popular estimate is 
something like this. And it is certain that 
the conception of the service of the state as 
in any respect sacred is utterly foreign to 
the mind of the average American citizen. 
That seems, now that I have written it 
down, a hard saying, but I cannot modify it. 
Politics is, in the common conception, as 
near to being completely " dissociated from 
religious, spiritual, or sacred matters or 
uses " as anything not criminal in this wide 
world could be. 

I wish to show that this common concep- 
tion is totally and even horribly erroneous. 
I would like to make it appear that there 
is no particular in which the common con- 
ception of life or duty is in more urgent 
need of modification than in this. If there 
is any function fulfilled by man which is 
essentially sacred, it is citizenship in a 
republic ; it is that which is involved in 
the services of the state. 

When we look in the Gospels for light 



BELIGION AND POLITICS. 167 

upon this question, we seem to find very lit- 
tle. The references of our Lord to political 
affairs are few; chief among them is his 
saying, " Render therefore to Caesar the 
things that are Caesar's, but to God the 
things that are God's." The fact that these 
references are so few is often cited as a rea- 
son why ministers of our day should let po- 
litical subjects alone. But the condition of 
the people among whom Jesus was living 
differed radically from those of our own 
country. The Jews, in the time of Christ, 
were a subject people ; they were not, in any 
important sense, a self-governing people. 
They had no share in the administration of 
their own national affairs. They had really 
but two political duties, — to submit to the 
Roman government and to pay their taxes. 
It is said, in the narrative to which allusion 
has been made, that two parties, the Phari- 
sees and the Herodians, were trying to en- 
tangle Jesus by their questions ; but these, 
so far as the government was concerned, 
were simply cliques or coteries; they were 



168 RELIGION AND POLITICS, 

not political parties, that divided the power 
between them ; neither of them had any 
hope of getting possession of the govern- 
ment except by revolution. All that was 
left to a Jew in the time of Christ was to 
endure the Roman rule, and to pay the tax- 
gatherer. These duties Jesus enjoined. 

There had been a time when the Jewish 
nation was independent ; when it was respon- 
sible for its own government ; and then the 
air was always ringing with the political 
preaching of the prophets. 

" The Jewish church," says Dr. Hodges, 
" was the Jewish nation. The prophets were 
patriot orators, who preached politics with 
vehemence, and entered might and main 
into public life. It is impossible to think of 
Isaiah as a quiet parish priest, living at the 
centre of a narrow circle, letting the great 
world outside go uninterrupted on its own 
mistaken way. In New York, in Boston, 
Isaiah would have been the heart and soul 
of a great, outspoken, radical, independ- 
ent, righteous newspaper. Amos and Hosea 



BELIGION AND POLITICS. 169 

would have put themselves in peril of the 
police by inflammatory speeches on the 
street corners and in the parks. All these 
men were interested in public questions pro- 
foundly and supremely. The saints of that 
time were the national heroes. They were 
the men who had done heroic service for the 
country. . . . These were the sacred names 
upon their church calendar. The leaders of 
the synagogue had been the guides of the 
national councils ; and their sons, who sat 
upon the front seats in their fathers' places, 
were eager to emulate their patriotism and 
their valor. There was no difference be- 
tween a parliament and a prayer-meeting. 
Any political question was also a religious 
question ; into which excellent condition, 
though in a more Christian spirit, may we 
come ourselves." ^ 

It was after this manner that religion and 
politics were blended in Israel, when the na- 
tion had a life of its own, and the prophets 
were the leaders of the people. Doubtless 

1 The Heresy of Cain, pp. 171, 172. 



170 RELIGION AND POLITICS, 

it would have been so now, if there had been 
any laws to make or any offices to fill, or 
any political duties to perform. Jesus did 
not preach politics to the Jews of his day 
for a very obvious reason. He would not, 
I dare say, have preached against slander to 
a congregation of mutes, nor against dancing 
to a congregation of cripples. If the Jews 
had had the government of their country in 
their own hands, is it probable that He would 
have had nothing to say about the way they 
administered it ? Read his arraignment of 
the Scribes and Pharisees, and judge. 

"Render to Caesar the things that are 
Csesar's." Pay your taxes and obey the laws. 
This was all they could do, and this He bade 
them do. The government was far from 
perfect ; it was in many ways unjust and 
oppressive : but a bad government is better 
than anarchy ; in a rough way it preserves 
order and prevents crime. Even Caesar — 
even the unspeakable Tiberius then upon 
the throne — stood for something sacred 
and venerable, and respect and obedience 



RELIGION AND POLITICS. 171 

must be paid to him as the representative 
of rightful power in the world. " Render 
therefore to Caesar the things that are 
Caesar's." 

There is a sense in which this admonition 
of our Master may apply to Americans. In 
a certain way we, the people of this country, 
are persons under authority. The laws of 
the land are, in their totality, expressions of 
the national spirit ; and they are entitled to 
be regarded by all citizens with veneration. 
The laws are supreme. To them we yield 
submission and loyal obedience. The offi- 
cers of the law, the magistrates, the judges, 
the governors, the persons who are called to 
represent and administer the law, stand, 
while they are in office, in a position of dig- 
nity and responsibility ; and so long as they 
are not evidently attempting to annul or de- 
feat the law, so long as they are really iden- 
tified with it, and are seeking to maintain 
it, we owe them respect and cooperation. 
There is, then, an important sense in which 
this command of Christ's, which enjoins 



172 RELIGION AND POLITICS, 

submission and respect to lawful authority, 
is applicable to American citizens. The 
fact is not to be lost sight of that the citi- 
zens of a republic occupy a double position, 
— that they are subjects as well as sover- 
eigns. A self-governing people is governed. 
It must know how to obey as well as how to 
command. The subordination must be as 
spontaneous as the franchise is free. 

But there are many occasions in a re- 
public when the maxim of Christ now be- 
fore us does not express the deepest fact in 
the life of the American citizen. " Render 
to Caesar the things that are Caesar's " is a 
commandment which considers us as sub- 
jects of government ; it bids us render to 
all their dues, — " tribute to whom tribute is 
due, custom to whom custom, fear to whom 
fear, honor to whom honor." But on elec- 
tion day, and on every occasion when the 
citizen contemplates the duties and respon- 
sibilities which culminate on election day, 
the citizen is not merely a subject, he is a 
sovereign. 



BELIGION AND POLITICS. 173 

" The proudest now is but ray peer, 
The highest not more high; 
To-day, of all the weary year, 
A king of men am I. 

"To-day alike are great and small, 
The nameless and the known ; 
My palace is the people's hall, 
The ballot box my throne." 

This is no sentimental exaggeration ; it is 
the statement of an exact, scientific, legal 
fact. The sovereignty resides in the body 
of the citizens, and nowhere else : they are 
the sovereign people. It is not my duty to 
Caesar that I am thinking about on election 
day, — or any day in the year when I con- 
sider the nomination of candidates or the 
election of officers ; for I stand in Caesar's 
place ; I sit on Caesar's throne ; it is Caesar's 
duty that rests upon my conscience ; and I 
am taking part in that august transaction 
on which the prophet was looking when he 
wrote : " Behold, a king shall reign in right- 
eousness and princes shall rule in judgment." 
Not our duty to Caesar, but the duty of 



174 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 

Caesar himself, the duty of ruling the land 
righteously, — this is the obligation that 
rests on every voter in a republican govern- 
ment. " The powers that be, are ordained 
of God." And who in a republic are "the 
powers that be " ? Not, clearly, the officials ; 
they are simply the employees, the servants 
of the sovereign. Their power is delegated. 
They receive it at the hands of the voters. 
The voters are the sovereigns. It is with 
them that the final responsibility rests. It 
is they who are ordained of God to establish 
justice, to defend liberty, to promote the 
common welfare. There is no power but of 
God ; and those with whom the sovereignty 
rests in any nation, those who are actually 
clothed with it, must know that they are 
ordained of God to rule in his stead, to 
know his will, and to do it here upon the 
earth. Citizenship in a republic can mean 
nothing less than this. Not more surely 
was David, in the olden time, chosen and 
anointed by Jehovah to rule Israel than 
every American voter, in these days, is 



RELIGION AND POLITICS. 175 

chosen and anointed by the Lord of Hosts 
to rule this land. 

There are people in this country who 
count it a religious thing to refrain from 
taking any part in the government of the 
country. They say that the Christian has 
no right to meddle with politics; that 
Christ's kingdom has nothing to do with 
the kingdoms of this world. This is no- 
thing but flat rebellion against the express 
command of God, who bids every ruler to 
rule with diligence. 

Surely there must be government upon 
the earth. There are theoretical anarchists, 
but their numbers are few, and their theo- 
ries are provisional merely ; they hope that 
the world may be governed in such a way 
that by and by it shall not need to be gov- 
erned at all. But meanwhile it must be 
governed. And for this government some- 
body must be responsible. In an absolute 
monarchy only one man is supposed to be 
responsible ; if he accepts the responsibility, 
and his subjects assent, well and good ; it 



176 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 

rests with him, and he becomes the repre- 
sentative of God in the world, ordained and 
commissioned for the establishment of jus- 
tice, the preservation of liberty, the promo- 
tion of welfare among his people. But in a 
republic the case is different. Here is no 
hereditary ruler ; here are no permanent 
office-bearers. Yet in this government the 
responsibility must rest somewhere. On 
whom does it rest ? Not surely upon the 
persons who are temporarily holding office. 
Their tenure of power is too limited and 
too slight to be charged with such a wide- 
reaching and permanent obligation. Ob- 
viously, it must rest upon the whole body of 
voting citizens. To them all the power is 
committed. They are the sole depositaries 
of the sovereignty. They are responsi- 
ble, jointly and severally, for good govern- 
ment. If God has ordained any '^ powers 
that be " in this land, the voters must be 
these " powers." The ultimate and respon- 
sible sovereignty can be located nowhere 
else but in them. It is not a matter of 



RELIGION AND POLITICS. Ill 

choice with them whether they will exercise 
it or not ; they are born into it ; it belongs 
to them, and they cannot divest themselves 
of it. It is not a matter of choice with me 
whether I will be the brother of my brother 
or the son of my father. Those relations 
were settled for me. It is not a matter of 
choice whether a man who is born in this 
free country will share the responsibility 
for the government of this country. When 
the time of his majority comes5 that burden 
rests uj)on him. If Paul's doctrine about 
rulers is true, it is God who has laid it upon 
him. For him to say that he will not ac- 
cept it is simply rebellion against God. 

To every citizen, then, these political du- 
ties are imperative and sacred. Up to the 
high places of the kings, up to the level oi 
the thrones, these solemn obligations sum- 
mon us all. In the choice of magistrates, 
in the selection of representatives, we must 
hear the voice of the King of kings, bidding 
us arise and gird ourselves with power for 
the great act of sovereignty. Such anoint- 



178 BELIGION AND POLITICS, 

ing as is implied in the investiture of cit- 
izenship should make every man sober, 
thoughtful, and humble. How can any 
man stand in the presence of a responsi- 
bility so great without deep searchings of 
heart ! 

" Look from the sky, 

Like God's great eye, 
Thou solemn moon, with searching beam, 

Till in the sight 

Of thy pure light 
Our mean self-seekings meaner seem. 

" Shame from our hearts 

Unworthy arts, 
The fraud designed, the purpose dark ; 

And smite away 

The hands we lay 
Profanely on the sacred ark." 

We have a service, in some of our 
churches, preparatory to the sacrament of 
the Lord's Supper, and we are wont to 
spend some hours of reflection and prayer 
in making ourselves ready worthily to 
enter into that solemn service. It will be 
regarded by many as an extravagant say- 



RELIGION AND POLITICS. 179 

ing, but I am speaking out of my deepest 
conviction, when I say that there is quite as 
much need of a deep and genuine religious 
preparation for the discharge of all the 
more important duties of citizenship. No 
man has any right to go to the political 
convention or to the polls ; no man has any 
right to take in his hand the ballot, on which 
he will record his judgment respecting the 
government of the city or the state or the 
nation, until he has purged his heart of 
every particle of self-seeking, of every ves- 
tige of partisanship ; until he is sure that he 
has put away from him all small piques and 
passions and all suggestions of personal 
interest in making his decision; until he 
knows that his supreme wish is to promote 
the glory of God, by promoting the highest 
good of the whole people. " Search me, O 
God, and know my heart : try me, and 
know my thoughts : and see if there be 
any wicked way in me, and lead me in the 
way of the eternal righteousness." If there 
is any time in his life when a good man 



180 



BELIGION AND POLITICS. 



needs to offer this prayer, it is when he 
confronts the high responsibilities of cit- 
izenship. 

It is true, then, that Jesus had very little 
to say about politics, for the simple reason 
that the people to whom He was always 
speaking had nothing to do with politics. 
But suppose that He had been standing 
every day in the presence of Caesar himself ; 
suppose that his daily walk had led Him 
over to the Palatine Hill in the Eternal 
City, when the brutal Tiberius was dwell- 
ing in the splendid palace of Augustus; 
and that this proud emperor, fountain of 
political authority, sovereign over the greater 
part of the then known world, had been 
confronted from time to time by Him who 
claimed to be the Messiah of God : — can 
it be imagined that Jesus would have had 
nothing to say to this powerful monarch 
concerning his duty as a ruler ? Can it 
be believed that the cruelty and extortion 
of the Roman rule would have gone un- 
rebuked, that its corruption would have 



RELIGION AND POLITICS. 181 

received no censure, that its prostitution of 
liberty and justice for gain would have 
called forth no protest ? Would not this 
despot have been bidden with the voice be- 
fore which Pilate quailed and trembled, to 
do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk 
humbly before God ? What else would the 
Lord himself have said than that which 
the prophets, speaking in his name, had 
many a time spoken to kings and princes? 
Might we not have heard Him quoting, as 
so often He quoted, from Isaiah the pro- 
phet : " How is the faithful city become an 
harlot ! she that was full of judgment ! 
righteousness lodged in her, but now mur- 
derers. Thy silver is become dross, thy 
wine mixed with water. Thy princes are 
rebellious, and companions of thieves ; every 
one loveth gifts and f oUoweth after rewards : 
they judge not the fatherless, neither doth 
the cause of the widow come unto them. 
O my people, they which lead thee cause 
thee to err, and destroy the way of thy 
path." 



182 BELIGION AND POLITICS. 

With some such words of reproof and 
admonition we may be sure that He to 
whom all the prophets bore witness would 
have preached righteousness to the rulers, 
if rulers then had been in the audiences to 
which He preached. And if He were speak- 
ing, in these days, to the audiences in our 
churches, which are so largely made up of 
rulers, I cannot have any doubt as to what 
would be the tenor of his message. That 
He would preach politics, in the narrow ac- 
ceptation of that term ; that He would ad- 
vocate the platform of any political party, 
or signify his preference among candidates, 
who represent nothing but party cries and 
catch- words, — no one for a moment supposes. 
But that He would impress upon all those 
listening to Him the sacredness and solem- 
nity of the responsibilities resting upon 
them to rule righteously and in the fear 
of God ; to put far away from them all 
thoughts of personal gains ; to seek, in the 
supreme exercise of the sovereignty in- 
trusted to them, the kingdom of God and 



RELIGION AND POLITICS. 183 

his righteousness, is not, I think, an open 
question. And no man who speaks in his 
name has any right to suppress the message. 
The pulpit is not the place for partisan poli- 
tics. But the pulpit is the place for enforc- 
ing upon the consciences of citizens the 
solemnity and the sacredness of the obliga- 
tions which rest upon them, and their duty 
to discharge these obligations, as the Prayer 
Book says of another great engagement, — 
"reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly, 
and in the fear of God." 

No one who has any adequate sense of 
existing political conditions will be inclined, 
I think, to censure the intensity of the plea 
here made for a view of political life and 
action which lifts it completely above the 
clamor and strife of the partisan assemblies 
into the serener air of the mountain-tops, 
where men stand face to face with God. For 
I am as sure as I can be of anything, that 
there is no salvation for this land of ours 
from the rising flood of factional strife and 
corporate greed, which threatens to engulf 



184 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 

our liberties, save in the heightened sense 
of the sacredness of the vocation with which 
every citizen is called. Many expedients 
for improving political morality are pro- 
posed, some of which are undoubtedly wise : 
Australian ballots, corrupt practices acts, 
proportional representation, the referendum, 
civil service reform, — all of them worthy 
of thought, but, after all, the fundamental 
need is a deeper conviction, in the heart of 
the citizen, of the truth that citizenship de- 
mands a consecrated spirit, a heroic self- 
denial, which shall make all the interests of 
business and all the motives of self-aggran- 
dizement subordinate to the welfare of the 
nation. 

It seems, indeed, almost quixotic to speak 
or think of cleansing the filthy pool of 
party politics : of infusing into the reservoir 
of low aims and selfish schemes and mean 
motives the clarifying power of a holy pur- 
pose. And, indeed, there are hours when it 
appears that the whole temper of the time is 
sordid and superficial and profane. 



BELIGION AND POLITICS. 185 

" Our slender life runs rippling by, and glides 
Into the silent hollow of the past ; 

What is there that abides 
To make the next age better for the last ? 

Is earth too poor to give us 
Something to live for here that shall outlive us ? 

Some more substantial boon 
Than such as flows and ebbs with Fortune's fickle moon ? 

The little that we see 

From doubt is never free ; 

The little that we do 

Is but half -nobly true ; 

With our laborious hiving 
What men call treasure, and the gods call dross, 

Life seems a jest of Fate's contriving, 

Only secure in every one's conniving, 
Along account of nothings paid with loss." 

But this is only the plaint of weariness, 
the outcry of a spirit that is distressed by 
the things that are seen, and that lacks the 
vision of things unseen and eternal. And 
the reassuring word can be no other than 
that of the poet himself : — 

" But stay ! no age was e'er degenerate, 
Unless men held it at too cheap a rate ; 
For in our likeness still we shape our fate. 



186 BELIGION AND POLITICS. 

Ah, there is something here 
Unfathomed by the cynic's sneer, 
Something that gives our feeble light 
A high immunity from Night, 
Something that leaps life's narrow bars 
To claim its birthright with the hosts of heaven ; 

A seed of sunshine that can leaven 
Our earthly dulness with the beams of stars, 

And glorify our clay 
With light from fountains elder than the Day ; 
A conscience more divine than we, 
A gladness fed with secret tears, 
A vexing, forward-reaching sense 
Of some more noble permanence ; 
A light across the sea. 
Which haunts the soul and will not let it be, 
Still beaconing from the heights of undegenerate years.'* 

It is only as this inspiration of a sacred 
purpose, this sense of a holy obligation, 
comes to those who lead in the great affairs 
of state ; only as the people themselves be- 
come aware of the truth that this nation, as 
truly as that other nation in the wilderness, 
needs the pillar of cloud by day and of fire 
by night, that light will break upon our 
future, and we shall behold with assured 



RELIGION AND POLITICS. 187 

vision the calm peace for which we wait 
and pray. 

It is not, then, solely or chiefly of our 
duty to Csesar that we as American citizens 
are called to think, but of our duty as 
Caesars, — kaisers, rulers of this free land. 
Who is Csesar ? Who is the king ? He is 
the anointed of God. He is the one whom 
God has chosen and set apart to rule. 
Such anointing and consecration has every 
one of us received, into whose hand is put 
the ballot. It is not our power that we 
wield : w^e have no power ; there is but one 
absolute Ruler, the Lord our righteousness. 
To us the power is intrusted by Him, that 
we may use it in his name. Let Caesar 
render to God what belongs to Him. 



VIII. 

PUBLIC OPINION. 



What I want to impress you with is the great weight 
that is attached to the opinion of everything that can 
call itself a man. Give me anything that walks erect 
and can read, and he shall count one in the millions of the 
Lord's sacramental host, which is yet to come up and 
trample all oppression in the dust. — Wendell Phillips, 
Speeches^ First Series, page 50. 

All free governments, whatever their name, are in 
reality governments by public opinion, and it is on the 
quality of this public opinion that their prosperity 
depends. It is, therefore, their first duty to purify the 
element from which they draw the breath of life. With 
the growth of democracy grows also the fear, if not the 
danger, that this atmosphere may be corrupted with 
poisonous exhalations from lower and more malarious 
levels, and the question of sanitation becomes more in- 
stant and pressing. Democracy, in its best sense, is 
merely the letting in of light and air. — James Russell 
Lowell, Democracy and Other Addresses, page 38. 



VIII. 

PUBLIC OPINION. 

One of the subjects concerning which a 
new conception of duty is greatly needed is 
the relation of the individual to the public 
opinion of the community. The creation 
and diffusion of a sound public opinion may 
be said to be the primary social duty. Pub- 
lic opinion is the motive power of demo- 
cratic institutions. It bears the same re- 
lation to Christian society that protoplasm 
bears to life. 

In that great treatise of Mr. James Bryce 
upon the American Commonwealth, one 
whole Part, twelve chapters, covering 122 
closely-printed pages, is devoted to this sub- 
ject of Public Oj)inion. It might be in- 
structive to read the headings of these 
chapters : " The Nature of Public Opinion ; 
Government by Public Opinion ; How Pub- 



192 PUBLIC OPINION, 

lie Opinion Eules in America ; Organs of 
Public Opinion ; National Characteristics 
as Moulding Public Opinion ; Classes as In- 
fluencing Opinion ; Local Types of Opinion 
East, West, and South ; The Action of 
Public Opinion ; The Fatalism of the Mul- 
titude ; The Tyranny of the Majority ; 
Wherein Public Opinion Fails ; Wherein 
Public Opinion Succeeds." This will serve 
to show what estimate is placed by a great 
publicist upon this force as it affects our 
social and national welfare. 

Nearly all modern governments are gov- 
ernments by public opinion. The case has 
greatly altered since the Oriental despot, 
whose will was the only law, was the type 
of the civil ruler. Louis XIV., a century 
and a half ago, could say in France : 
"What is the State? I am the State." 
But it is long since anybody would dare to 
say that in France. The Czar of Russia 
comes pretty near being an absolute ruler, 
but nothing is so clear as that his absolu- 
tism is his weakness. The fiery young Ger- 



PUBLIC OPINION, 193 

man emperor talks large about " my gov- 
ermnent " and " my people," and assumes 
that he alone is responsible for the conduct 
of affairs in that great empire ; nevertheless, 
he is beginning to listen well to the under- 
tone of public opinion. 

" Opinion," says Mr. Bryce, " has really 
been the chief and ultimate power in nearly 
all nations at nearly all times. I do not 
mean merely the opinion of the class to 
which the rulers belong. Obviously, the 
small oligarchy of Venice was influenced 
by the opinion of the Venetian nobility, as 
the absolute Czar is influenced now by the 
opinion of his court and his army. I mean 
the opinion, unspoken, unconscious, but not 
the less real and potent, of the masses of the 
people. Governments have always rested, 
and, special cases apart, must rest, if not 
on the affection, then on the reverence or 
awe; if not on the active approval, then 
on the silent acquiescence, of the numerical 
majority. It is only by rare exception that 
the monarch or an oligarchy has maintained 



194 PUBLIC OPINION. 

authority against the will of the people. . . . 
The difference between despotically gov- 
erned and free countries does not consist in 
the fact that the latter are ruled by opinion 
and the former by force, for both are gen- 
erally ruled by opinion. It consists rather 
in this, that in the former the people in- 
stinctively obey a power which they do not 
know to be really of their own creation and 
to stand by their own permission ; whereas 
in the latter the people feel their supremacy, 
and consciously treat their rulers as their 
agents, while the rulers obey a power which 
they admit to have made and to be able to 
unmake them, — the popular will." ^ 

When our Declaration of Independence 
says that rulers derive all their just powers 
from the consent of the governed, we may 
question the form of the apothegm. If it 
means that the consent of the governed 
makes the rule just, we must dissent. Rul- 
ers may obtain the consent of the governed 
to do an unjust thing ; their consent does 

^ The American Commonwealth, ii. 216-219. 



PUBLIC OPINION. 195 

not make it just. A majority vote for a 
wrong does not make it right. The quality 
of justice is not given to the act of a magis- 
trate by the approval of the people ; that 
quality is tested by other standards. The 
magistrate's act may be just, though all the 
people disapprove ; it may be unjust, though 
they unanimously approve. This is not 
likely, but it is possible. 

But though justice is not due to popular 
consent, power is ; we may truly say that 
governments derive their effective powers 
from the consent of the people ; to be eff- 
cient^ the government must follow the gen- 
eral direction of public opinion. 

Legislation is, in a general way, the crys- 
tallization into statutes of public opinion. 
It is not always so, indeed; sometimes a 
few men get notions into their heads which 
they conceive to be expedient or beneficial, 
and succeed, by adroitly manipulating legis- 
lative bodies, in getting them framed into 
law, although they do not represent the 
wishes or the judgment of any considerable 



196 PUBLIC OPINION. 

number of the people. Such legislation is 
generally nugatory ; and a great mass of 
dead laws, which have had some such origin, 
incumber our statute-books. Living and 
effective laws are, however, the expression 
of public opinion ; they put into legal form 
what the majority of the people have been 
thinking and wishing. 

It is public opinion, also, that makes 
the executive strong, and that gives vigor 
and force to the administration of the laws. 
If the mayor or the sheriff or the state ex- 
ecutive knows that the people demand the 
enforcement of any given law, he is likely 
to enforce it diligently. He may, from in- 
terested motives, be remiss or negligent, but 
he is not likely to be ; he does not think it 
safe ; he feels the pressure of public opinion, 
and yields to it. If, on the other hand, 
there be any law whose execution depends 
on the will of the magistrate, and concern- 
ing which the people have ceased to have a 
positive opinion and an active interest, its 
enforcement is apt to be lax. There are 



PUBLIC OPINION. 197 

exceptional cases in which this is not true. 
There are magistrates who, when intrusted 
with the enforcement of law, regard them- 
selves as bound to do the thing that they 
have sworn to do, whether the pressure of 
public opinion is felt or not. They assume 
that public opinion has already expressed it- 
self in the enactment of the law ; that the 
people in electing them must be understood 
as commanding them to execute the law ; 
and that they have no right to sit down and 
wait until public opinion prompts and im- 
pels and scourges them to action. This, I 
think, is the only right and sound theory of 
the function of an executive ; but, unfortu- 
nately, there are a good many executives 
who do not think so ; who will do about 
what they are driven to do by the immedi- 
ate pressure of public opinion, and not 
much more. 

In view of this fact, it behooves the peo- 
ple, who are the rulers, to do one of two 
things, — either to elect men who will ob- 
serve their oaths and execute the laws, with- 



198 PUBLIC OPINION. 

out being prompted and prodded by public 
opinion ; or else to create and maintain an 
active public opinion, by which derelict of- 
ficials shall be prompted and prodded to do 
their duty. And perhaps the safest course 
would be to do both these things at once. 

If, then, public opinion not only makes 
but executes our laws, its vast importance 
in our social and national life must be evi- 
dent. It is, indeed, the power that rules 
the republic. It is the force which drives 
all our governmental machinery. It is a 
little more than power, it is direction, also. 
It not only makes the machinery go, it de- 
termines the course that it shall take, the 
product that it shall evolve. The steam 
that drives the engine of the ship does not 
guide the vessel, it simply produces mo- 
tion ; the hand of the helmsman determines 
the direction of the vessel. The steam that 
sets the spindles and the looms and the 
lathes in motion does not determine what 
the machinery shall produce. But public 
opinion, by its very nature, is directive as 



PUBLIC OPINION. 199 

well as impulsive ; it sets the machinery of 
government in motion, and tells it what to 
do ; it moves the propeller, and it also holds 
the helm. 

It is, then, of the very deepest importance 
that it should be sound and strong, with 
plenty of push and propulsion in it, and 
that it should also be sane and wise, so that 
the movements which it causes shall be 
guided to right ends. 

I have already intimated that it is by no 
means infallible. It is the power that rules 
the republic ; and the governmental defects 
and failures of the republic are due, in the 
final analysis, to the infirmity or the per- 
version or the misdirection of this power. 

Public opinion may be weak. There may 
be a lack of general and active interest in 
public questions. Everybody may be so 
busy with his own personal and private af- 
fairs that he shall have no time or thought 
left for public affairs, or, if he thinks of 
them at all, thinks of them only as they af- 
fect his private interests. In such a case, 



200 PUBLIC OPINION. 

we have nothing that can properly be termed 
public opinion ; we have a great mass of 
conflicting and quarreling private wishes 
and aims, but no real concern for the com- 
mon weal. I fear that this is a condition to 
which, in our eager, money-making age, we 
sometimes approximate. We are so en- 
grossed with our own enterprises and am- 
bitions that we do not devote much serious 
time and thought to the concerns of the 
public. It is true that our private interests 
are often greatly affected by public action. 
When the city government becomes reckless 
and corrupt, and taxes grow to be enormous, 
we feel the burden keenly, and are ready 
to contribute to the formation of public 
opinion a good deal of energetic grumbling. 
When the tariff affects our business, we feel 
constrained to take a hand in discussing it, 
albeit we may not be able to tell very defi- 
nitely what is wrong and how to right it. 
But this kind of opinion, which springs 
solely from a regard for our own selfish in- 
terests, is not the kind of public opinion 



PUBLIC OPINION. 201 

which ought to rule the republic. Doubtless 
there does often come out of this struggle 
of conflicting interests a resultant force, by 
which the action of the legislatures and the 
magistrates is swayed ; but this is not what 
we mean by a sound and strong public 
opinion. 

It is generally true of our people, how- 
ever, that there is, apart from this desire to 
secure such public action as shall advance 
our private interests, a good deal of thought 
and care among us, directed to the public 
welfare. We are not, as a people, destitute 
of the instincts and impulses of patriotism. 
The national or the municipal weal is often 
in our mind, and we desire to do what we 
can to promote it. I would not say that 
public opinion is a weak or ineffective force 
in this country; I often wish that it were 
stronger ; but it is sometimes very powerful. 

But public opinion needs to be sane and 
wise as well as strong. It ought to guide 
as well as propel. It needs not only mus- 
cles to push, but eyes to see. It is here that 



202 PUBLIC OPINION. 

its worst failures appear. What we call 
public opinion — that is, the popular im- 
pulse and demand — is often horribly blind, 
fickle, cruel. One day Public Opinion met 
the Man of Nazareth, entering the city of 
Jerusalem, and strewed his path with gar- 
ments and palm - branches, shouting " Ho- 
sanna to the Son of David ! Blessed is He 
that Cometh in the name of the Lord ! " 
Five days later, this same Public Opinion 
found utterance through a raging mob, that 
stormed at the door of Pilate's judgment 
hall, and shouted, " Not this man, but Ba- 
rabbas ! Away with this man ! Crucify 
him I crucify him ! " Public opinion 
crowded the Duomo in Florence with ap- 
plauding audiences when Savonarola spoke 
from its pulpit in March, and in April it 
sacked his convent and clamored for his 
blood. Public opinion swept this country 
with one political verdict in the autumn of 
1892, and with what was understood to be a 
directly contradictory verdict in the autumn 
of 1893. I do not think that either action 



PUBLIC OPINION. 203 

was guided by reason. It was a matter of 
impulse and prejudice more than of judg- 
ment. 

Indeed, so long as tlie majority of indi- 
viduals are controlled in their conduct more 
by prejudice and impulse than by reason 
and judgment, we must expect that what 
we call public opinion will be largely 
swayed by gusts of passion, by tidal waves 
of reasonless infatuation and blind antip- 
athy. And the truth is, that an aggregation 
of prejudiced and passionate men is far 
more irrational than any one of them. A 
mob is more brainless and more cruel than 
any single man of the mob would be likely 
to be if he were acting independently. I 
have seen the mob spirit take possession of 
an ecclesiastical assembly, prejudice and 
passion usurping the place of reason and 
conscience ; and I have seen very unjust 
and cruel deeds done under that inspira- 
tion. 

It is evident, then, that the force which 
we describe as public opinion is not always 



204 PUBLIC OPINION. 

wise when it is strong. It is liable to make 
fatal mistakes and to do terrible mischiefs. 
And the real trouble with it, generally, 
is that it is not truly public opinion^ but 
public prejudice and public passion. If it 
were the aggregate thought of the whole 
multitude, it would be less likely to go 
astray ; but the concentrated passion of the 
multitude is not so safe a guide. In a mul- 
titude of counselors there is sometimes wis- 
dom ; but in a multitude of shouters there 
is only noise. To infuse into this incoher- 
ent and tumultuous mass of sentiment and 
impulse a little more informing and guid- 
ing thought is, then, the first thing to be 
desired. 

Such, then, is this force that shapes con- 
stitutions and statutes, that lifts up and casts 
down governors and magistrates. It seems 
a very weak thing ; but when the breath of 
God is in it, it is mighty to the pulling down 
of strongholds ; and when the fumes of the 
pit pervade it, the commonwealth becomes 
pandemonium. When public opinion is 



PUBLIC OPINION, 205 

sound and wholesome, social evils go down 
before it, as the snow disappears under the 
May-day sun ; when public opinion is fee- 
ble and ineffectual, all manner of abuses 
come forth and intrench themselves in soci- 
ety and in government. And I say that the 
importance of creating and diffusing a sound 
public opinion is very little understood by 
most of us. Surely, this is the central and 
vital element in our national life. Pub- 
lic opinion means to the republic all that 
power means to machinery. Any man who 
is building a steamship or a factory thinks 
first about his power. It is useless and ab- 
surd to build engines or machines, no mat- 
ter how perfect, unless there is power to run 
them. But we Americans give ten times as 
much thought, in our politics, to the con- 
struction of political machinery, as we do to 
the provision of adequate and well-directed 
power to move it. But public opinion is 
far more to the republic than power is to 
machinery. It is all that the life-blood in 
the veins is to the human body. It is the 



206 PUBLIC OPINION. 

vital element of the national life. To keep 
it pure and healthy, and thoroughly vital- 
ized with the living breath of God, is the 
most important task that any Christian 
patriot can place before his mind. 

And how is it that right public opinion 
is created ? The newspaper is supposed to 
have something to do with it ; but there are 
two theories about the function of the news- 
paper. By some persons the newspaper 
is suppose to generate public opinion ; by 
others merely to reflect it. The most con- 
spicuous journal in the world, the " London 
Times," has been conducted on the theory 
that it is the business of the newspaper to 
understand and express public opinion. The 
other theory is the one most commonly held, 
— that a newspaper ought to instruct and 
guide public opinion. Practically, however, 
the tendencies just now are all in the other 
direction ; for what is called journalism is 
more and more regarded as a business ; and 
the commercial success of the venture is the 
first thing considered. When this is the 



PUBLIC OPINION. 207 

case, the counting-room, of course, dictates 
the policy of the paper ; and this can mean 
nothing else than that the chief effort will 
be to conform to the prevailing public senti- 
ment, and not to antagonize it. Doubtless 
much is done by the best newspapers to 
instruct and invigorate public opinion, and 
much is done by the worst to mislead and 
debauch it. I am by no means sure on 
which side is the preponderance. But I am 
very sure that it will never do to depend on 
that agency for the creation and mainte- 
nance of the kind of public opinion which 
will rule the state beneficently. 

Really this task is a very simple one, so 
simple that we altogether overlook its im- 
portance. Public opinion is merely the 
aggregate opinion of all the people, the re- 
sultant movement of the various thought of 
many men with many minds. All that is 
needed for the formation of a sound public 
opinion is that the great majority of the 
people should have clear ideas on subjects 
of public concernment, and should freely 



208 PUBLIC OPINION. 

express them. Nothing can be simpler than 
this solution ; but simple things are not al- 
ways easy. The solution of the temperance 
problem is simple, — get everybody to stop 
drinking ; but it is not easy. Still it is well 
to keep before us the fact that as the ocean 
is made up of water-drops, so the power 
which sways governments and works right- 
eousness in the earth is only the combina- 
tion of the thoughts and judgments of the 
various individuals who compose the masses 
of the people. And the sense of individual 
responsibility for the invigoration and direc- 
tion of the power needs to be cultivated by 
every one of us. This is manifestly one of 
the cases in which what is everybody's busi- 
ness may be nobody's. That maxim needs 
to be supplanted by the sounder saying: 
" What is everybody's business must be my 
business." 

The duty of the individual must involve 
first, some careful effort to form opinions 
upon questions of public welfare. What is 
wanted is opinion, individual judgment. 



PUBLIC OPINION. 209 

upon all these questions. Mere impressions 
or prepossessions are not sufficient ; every 
man ought to know what can be said against 
the position he takes, as well as what can 
be said for it ; and his conclusion should 
represent an honest attempt to bring the 
question of the hour under the light of rea- 
son, and to find out all the facts upon which 
a sound judgment should be based. It must 
be admitted that, in spite of the free schools 
of which we boast so much, the popular 
ignorance upon vital questions of political 
and social morality is still vast and pro- 
found, even here in republican America. 
Witness the financial schemes of the most 
transparent immorality and absurdity which 
constantly flourish among us ; witness, also, 
the epidemics of brutal intolerance that oc- 
casionally sweep over the land ; and notice 
how easy it is for political advocates to con- 
vince the masses that any lack of prosperity 
must be the fault of the party in power. 
Upon these larger questions of the state 
there is, however, far more intelligence than 



210 PUBLIC OPINION. 

upon matters of local government. Very- 
few citizens take any pains to inform them- 
selves respecting the administration of the 
town or the city in which they live. They 
take a great deal more interest in the tariff 
debate or the Hawaiian imbroglio than in 
the organized raids made upon the treasury 
of their own town by the gang that always 
beleaguers it, and in the offensive and de- 
fensive alliances existing between their local 
officials and the lawless classes. There is 
often a great deal of vague suspicion and 
accusation respecting all this ; but of clear 
and positive knowledge there is not much. 
The citizens do not, as a rule, take pains to 
inform themselves. Therefore there cannot 
be any adequate force of public opinion to 
deal with them. There is sometimes a good 
deal of impatient and irritated feeling, but 
it is apt to strike out wildly and attack the 
wrong person, or make charges that cannot 
be sustained. In order that no injustice 
may be done, that the Demos may not de- 
generate into a mob and destroy the right- 



PUBLIC OPINION. 211 

eous with the wicked, there is need that the 
citizens should possess the intelligence from 
which may spring a rational public opinion. 

Some sense of the importance of clear 
knowledge upon these great matters is evi- 
dently taking possession of the public mind. 
Within the past few years there has been a 
great revival of interest in social and civic 
problems ; groups of men and women in 
almost every community are studying them 
with the most enthusiastic interest. In all 
the colleges and universities, questions of 
this class have suddenly been advanced to 
the forefront of the curriculum ; the amount 
of work done upon subjects which relate to 
the public welfare is, I suppose, fourfold 
greater than it was twenty years ago. All 
this gives promise of a day when the first 
prerequisite of a sound public opinion — 
clear aiid accurate knowledge of public ques- 
tions — shall be more fully supplied than it 
is at the present time. 

But it is not enough to have clear ideas 
about public affairs ; we must also be brave 



212 PUBLIC OPINION. 

enough to utter them. The ignorance of 
the American citizen about the business af- 
fairs and the social conditions of his own 
municipality is often reprehensible, but his 
cowardice is far worse. That which he does 
know full well, he often will not declare. It 
will make him disagreeably prominent, per- 
haps ; it will lead to discussions and contro- 
versies which it is pleasanter to avoid ; it 
will bring down upon him the wrath of the 
classes who live by plunder ; it will disturb 
some of his social relations ; it may injure 
his business ; therefore, he seals his lips and 
refuses to testify. How few men we find in 
any community, who have the courage of 
their convictions upon questions that con- 
cern the public welfare, — who are willing 
to speak right out in criticism of that which 
is palpably wrong. How many there are 
who are ready to say, when you appeal to 
them for support in any enterprise which 
involves conflict with evil powers : " I shall 
be glad to aid you financially, but it must 
be confidential ; my name must not appear ; 



PUBLIC OPINION. 213 

I cannot afford to have it known that I am 
identified with the scheme." Assistance of 
this sort is really worth very little. Many 
of our reforms have split upon this rock. 
What is most wanted is something that 
money cannot buy ; it is precisely that which 
these crafty citizens withhold, — the per- 
sonal influence and support of the reputable 
classes. If all the men who sit in their 
counting-rooms and write their checks in aid 
of good causes would come out into the 
public square and declare themselves the 
friends of these causes, there would be very 
little need of money ; an invigorated public 
opinion would push the enterprise to its 
goal. 

The utterance of the truth that is in him, 
bravely, clearly, constantly, upon all ques- 
tions of public duty, — this is one of the 
primary obligations of every citizen of a re- 
publican state. The obligation of the Chris- 
tian citizen is precisely the same as that of 
the Christian believer. Conviction is not 
enough ; there must also be confession. 



214 PUBLIC OPINION. 

What the man believes in the heart he must 
declare with the lips. To be ashamed or 
afraid to utter the truth that he believes is 
the gravest of delinquencies. And there is 
just as much reason that the citizen should 
witness a good confession as there is that 
the disciple should do so. Indeed, the rea- 
sons are the same in both cases. The prev- 
alence of the spiritual kingdom of our Lord 
is secured by faithful witnessing. It is by 
the testimony of believers that converts are 
made and the kingdom is extended and es- 
tablished. If every man who knows that 
Christ is king would speak out and tell 
what he knows, his kingdom would come 
with power. We may say that it is the 
divine plan that a sound and vigorous pub- 
lic opinion should be created in favor of 
the kingdom of heaven ; and that it is to 
be created by the outspoken confession of 
loyalty on the part of individual believers. 
The same law holds in regard to the promo- 
tion of all social and civic reforms. These, 
too, depend upon the public opinion of the 



PUBLIC OPINION. 215 

community, and the public opinion of the 
community is simply the consentaneous voice 
of individual men and women openly declar- 
ing the truth that is in their minds. Such 
utterance sometimes costs discomfort and 
suffering ; but let no man suppose that civic 
righteousness and social peace can be won 
without sacrifice. It cost something to es- 
tablish our liberties; it costs something to 
preserve them, — more, I fear, than some of 
us are willing to pay. But the beginning 
of all good fidelity to the trust committed to 
us is here, — in the willingness to know the 
truth respecting the interests committed to 
our charge, and in the readiness to speak 
the truth we know without fear or favor, on 
every proper occasion, whether men will 
hear or whether they will forbear. It is the 
most elementary of all our public obliga- 
tions ; it is also, I think, the most stringent. 
Infidelity to this obligation produces a social 
malady for which there is no cure ; fidelity 
to this obligation creates a social force in 
whose presence no evil can long endure. 



IX. 

PHARISAISM. 



Look at the character in its essence, only changing its 
dress, its class of particular virtues, according- to circum- 
stances, and taking off one and putting on another as the 
public standard shifts ; thus cleared of its accidents, look 
at it ; is there anything old about it ? It is new ; it is 
fresh ; it is modern ; it is living ; it is old in the sense of 
human nature being old, but in no other. It is a type of 
evil much more likely to increase than decay, — to in- 
crease as the standard of advancing- society throws the 
corrupt principle in man more upon policy rather than 
open heathen resistance. Formality and routine are not 
essential to the Pharisee ; he feeds his character upon 
ancient disciplinarian virtues, if he has nothing else to 
feed it upon ; but he flourishes quite as much upon utili- 
tarian and active virtues if they are uppermost. — J. B. 
MozLEY, University and Other Sermons, page 39. 

He condemned equally the conduct of the Pharisees 
and their perversions of the law, and found in their 
unveracious dealing with the Scriptures the secret and 
explanation of all their other unveracities. Their tradi- 
tions transgressed the commandments of God. . . . The 
most absolute slave of the letter is always the man who 
does it most violence. While he professes to be devoted 
to the law, he devises interpretations that annul its most 
distinctive precepts. — A. M. Fairbairn, Studies in the 
Life of Christ, page 171. 

Some great pervasive and consolidated wrong may 
rest in the presence of the church, with hardly a percep- 
tible power of rebuke on the part of the pulpit. . . . The 
church has no purchase, no leverage against it. It nour- 
ishes pietism, but loses humanity. — John Bascom, The 
New Theology, page 180. 



IX. 

PHARISAISM. 

Is any new conception needed respecting 
Pharisaism? Nineteen hundred years ago 
it was a burning question : no issue was 
more vital or more deadly than that which 
it presented ; the kingdom of heaven had 
no force to reckon with that was of greater 
importance. Is it a living issue ? Is there 
anything in the world to-day resembling that 
dead wall of formalism and hypocrisy, which 
stood across the path of Him who came 
bringing life and immortality to light ? Is 
Pharisaism an archaeological curiosity or 
an ever-present fact? A little study may 
throw light upon these questions. 

The Pharisees arose, as a party in the 
Jewish nation, a little more than a century 
and a half before the birth of Christ, under 
the reign of the Syrian dynasty. 



220 PHARISAISM. 

After the exile, Judea was for some time 
a dependency of the Persian kingdom ; 
sometimes there was a political representa- 
tive of the Persian throne at Jerusalem, 
but a considerable degree of home rule was 
allowed, and the high priest was the real 
head of the nation. Thus the religious in- 
dependence of the people was recognized, 
while they were politically subject to Persia. 
When Alexander the Great conquered Per- 
sia, Judea passed under the control of the 
Macedonian kings of Egypt ; and then, 
still later, into the hands of the Greek 
rulers of Syria, the Seleucidse. Under both 
these dynasties the religious liberty of the 
Jews was recognized, except during the 
reign of Antiochus Epiphanes, when a most 
determined attempt was made to stamp out 
the national faith and substitute for it the 
Greek Paganism. This attempt led to that 
patriotic rebellion of the Hasmoneans, or 
Maccabees, the last effort of the Jews to 
establish their independence. During this 
struggle the Pharisees arose. They were 



PHARISAISM. 221 

not, strictly, a patriotic party; with the 
aims of the Maccabean leaders to estab- 
lish a Jewish dynasty they had not much 
sympathy. If Judea became politically in- 
dependent, the state would exercise consid- 
erable control over the church ; politics and 
religion would, in their judgment, be too 
much mixed. Indeed, some of these Mac- 
cabean rulers had assumed the office of high 
priest, and had exercised its functions. This 
was wholly contrary to the ideas of the 
Pharisees. They wished to keep religion 
and politics entirely separate. They cared 
very little for political independence ; they 
preferred that the nation should have a for- 
eign master, who would leave them free to 
develop their religious life in their own way. 
The Sadducees were the party that sup- 
ported the efforts of the Hasmoneans for po- 
litical independence ; but the Pharisees, like 
a good many people in these days, thought 
that the sacred and the secular should be 
kept entirely distinct. " The Hasmoneans," 
says Wellhausen, " had no hereditary right 



222 PHARISAISM. 

to the high-priesthood, and their politics, 
which aimed at the establishment of a na- 
tional monarchy, were contrary to the whole 
spirit and essence of the second theocracy. 
The presupposition of that theocracy was 
foreign domination ; in no other way could 
its sacred, i. e. clerical, character be main- 
tained. God and the law could not but be 
forced into the background, if a warlike 
kingdom, retaining indeed the forms of a 
hierocracy, but really violating its spirit at 
every point, should ever grow out of a mere 
pious community. Above all, how could 
the scribes hope to retain their importance, 
if temple and synagogue were cast into the 
shade by politics and clash of arms." ^ In 
the early years of the Maccabean insurrec- 
tion the patriotic spirit of the Jews tri- 
umphed over the Pharisaic spirit, and the 
influence of this party was very slight. 
But gradually their numbers increased, and 
their power strengthened, until, in the time 
of Christ, they were the predominant party ; 
1 Encyclopoedia Britanmca, article " Israel.'' 



PHARISAISM. 223 

the Scribes and the Pharisees, as the gospel 
records make plain, were the ruling faction 
when our Lord was on the earth. 

The very fact that the religious ideas of 
the Pharisees constrained them to take an 
unpatriotic attitude, and to look with dis- 
favor upon attempts to restore the national 
independence, would raise in some minds a 
question as to the genuineness of their 
religion. A faith that is at war with patri- 
otism needs, at any rate, to be scrutinized. 
Such w^as not the faith of the early prophets ; 
and in all the later centuries, love of God 
and love of country have finely blended in 
the characters of the noblest of earth. 

No complete statement of the peculiar 
tenets of the Pharisees can here be given : 
a few illustrative particulars must suffice. 

The Pharisees were the people of the 
Law. To them the Torah, the Mosaic leg- 
islation, embodied the sum of all wisdom. 
Every dot and every curve of every letter 
of that law was significant. And besides 
this, they held that the written law had 



224 PHARISAISM. 

been accompanied by an oral law, explain- 
ing and expanding it ; which oral law had 
been handed down by tradition, and was 
every whit as sacred and binding as the 
text of the Mosaic books. The worship of 
the letter, to which the Pharisees thus be- 
came devoted, was the most elaborate sys- 
tem of externalism ever invented. Every 
religious observance was hedged about with 
the most minute and fantastic directions and 
explanations ; so that if the rite had origi- 
nally possessed some spiritual significance, 
its meaning would be completely buried out 
of sight beneath the superincumbent mass 
of rubric. Thus, to give only a single ex- 
ample, it was supposed to be the duty of 
every Jew to light candles in his house on 
the eve of the Sabbath. It is not clear 
whence this observance arose, for there is 
no Levitical rule requiring it. But it had 
been accepted as part of the regular pro- 
gramme, and then the doctors began to 
speculate as to how these candles should be 
lighted. One would have said that the mere 



PHARISAISM. 225 

method of lighting them could not be of 
any great consequence, if only their cheerful 
light appeared in the home ; but the one 
who said that could not have been a Phari- 
see. To him this was a very profound and 
important question, far more serious than 
any inquiry that could possibly arise con- 
cerning your duty to your neighbor. And 
this was part of his reasoning about it, 
as extracted from a Jewish prayer book: 
''With what sort of wick and oil are the 
candles of the Sabbath to be lighted, and 
with what are they not to be lighted ? They 
are not to be lighted with the woolly sub- 
stance that grows upon cedars, nor with un- 
dressed flax, nor with silk, nor with rushes, 
nor with leaves out of the wilderness, nor 
with moss that grows on the surface of 
water, nor with pitch, nor with wax, nor with 
oil made of cotton-seed, nor with the fat of 
the tail or the entrails of beasts. Nathan 
Hamody saith it may be lighted with boiled 
suet ; but the wise men say, be it boiled or 
not boiled, it may not be lighted with it. 



226 PHARISAISM. 

It may not be lighted with burnt oil on festi- 
val days. Eabbi Ishmael says it may not be 
lighted with train-oil, because of honor to 
the Sabbath ; but the wise men allow all 
sorts of oil ; with mixed oil, oil of nuts, oil 
of radish seed, oil of fish, of gourd seed, of 
resin and gum. Rabbi Tarphun saith 
they are not to be lighted but with oil of ol- 
ives. Nothing that grows out of the woods is 
used for lighting but flax, and nothing that 
grows out of woods doth pollute by the pol- 
lution of a tent but flax ; the wick of cloth 
that is doubled, and hath not been singed, 
Eabbi Eleazar saith it is unclean and may 
not be lighted withal ; Rabbi Akibah says 
it is clean and may be lighted withal. A 
man may not split a shell of an egg and fill 
it with oil and put it in the socket of a can- 
dlestick, because it shall blaze, though the 
candlestick be of earthenware ; but Rabbi 
Jehudah permits it ; if the potter made it 
with a hole through at first, it is allowed 
because it is the same vessel. No man shall 
fill a platter with oil and give it place next 



PHARISAISM. 227 

to the lamp and put the head of a wick on 
a platter to make it drop the oil ; but Rabbi 
Jehudah permits it." ^ 

Does this convey a precise idea to any 
mind respecting what may and may not be 
done in this extremely critical matter of 
lighting the candles at home on the Sabbath 
eve? Would a conscientious Jew, anxious 
to fulfill the law to the very letter, be per- 
fectly clear as to his duty, after he had 
waded through these voluminous directions ? 
I should think that early candle-lighting on 
the eve of the Sabbath, in a Jewish house- 
hold, must have been a time of great soli- 
citude. What our Lord says about the 
manner in which the Scribes and Pharisees 
made the law void by their traditions, and 
about their binding heavy burdens and 
grievous to be borne and laying them on 
men's shoulders, finds some explanation in 
these extracts from their own literature. 

Pharisaism was the deification of detail, 
the apotheosis of the trivial. It put so 

1 Smith's Bible Dictionary, article ** Pharisees." 



228 PHABISAISM. 

mucli stress upon minutiae that no weight 
was left for things momentous. In leveling 
up petty technicalities it leveled down great 
principles. If you undertake, in reading 
the Constitution of the United States, to 
ascribe deep and profound significance to 
the dot over every i and the tail of every 
comma, dwelling, for hours at a time, on 
such trivialities, it is clear that you will 
never comprehend the real meaning of that 
instrument. And the mind that is trained 
to weigh and measure and discuss these ri- 
diculous trifles utterly loses its grasp upon 
the serious things of life. 

The inevitable effect of this exaltation of 
insignificant things is thus a woeful lack of 
moral perspective. Eeligious routine is the 
main thing ; the great values of character, 
the great claims of humanity, take a subor- 
dinate place. Mint and anise and cummin 
are to be tithed with religious scrupulosity, 
but judgment, mercy, and faith go by de- 
fault. " In the hearing of all the people," 
we are told, Jesus " said unto his disciples, 



PHARISAISM. 229 

Beware of the Scribes, which desire to walk 
in long robes, and love salutations in the 
market-places, and chief seats in the syna- 
gogues, and chief places at feasts ; which 
devour widows' houses, and for a pretense 
make long prayers : these shall receive 
greater condemnation." The denunciations 
which Jesus visited upon these people are 
terrible ; the words flash and crackle to this 
day with the intensity of indignation : "• Woe 
unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites ! 
for ye build the sepulchres of the prophets 
and garnish the tombs of the righteous, 
and say. If we had been in the days of our 
fathers, we should not have been partakers 
with them in the blood of the prophets. 
Wherefore ye witness to yourselves that ye 
are sons of them that slew the prophets. 
Fill ye up then the measure of your fathers. 
Ye serpents, ye offspring of vipers, how 
shall ye escape the judgment of hell ? " "It 
is difficult," says one, " to avoid the conclu- 
sion that his repeated denunciations of the 
Pharisees mainly exasperated them into tak- 



230 PHARISAISM. 

ing measures for causing his death ; so that 
in one sense He may be said to have shed 
his blood and to have laid down his life in 
protesting against their practice and spirit. 
. . . Hence, to understand the Pharisees is, 
by contrast, an aid towards understanding 
the spirit of uncorrupted Christianity." 

The absolute contrast between the spirit 
of Christianity and the spirit of Pharisaism 
it is hardly necessary to point out. Phar- 
isaism puts its emphasis upon externals, 
Christianity upon the spirit and the life ; 
Pharisaism is a system of minute rules, 
Christianity rests upon great principles ; 
Pharisaism cares most for the perfection of 
ritual and least for the perfection of char- 
acter ; Christianity regards as hateful and 
accursed any mere formality which is put 
forward as a screen for evil conduct. The 
men who devour widows' houses and for a 
pretense make long prayers are the men on 
whom falls the withering malediction of the 
meek and lowly Jesus. 

It would seem that the evil thing against 



PHARISAISM. 231 

which our Lord waged such relentless war- 
fare, and which, at the last, was his mur- 
derer, could never find entrance into his 
church ; and yet it must be owned that 
much of the leaven of the Pharisees is mixed 
with our modern Christianity. We cannot 
conceive that Jesus could maintain any other 
attitude before it than that which. He held 
nineteen centuries ago ; and we must won- 
der what He would say if He entered some 
modern churches and found the essential 
spirit of Pharisaism comfortably installed 
behind their altars. 

The manifestations of this spirit are 
many. The exaltation of details and tech- 
nicalities to the great neglect of the ever- 
lasting verities is a type of Pharisaism 
which is common enough : how often do we 
find the servants of Christ chaffering and 
quarreling about some petty question of 
dogma or ritual, which has not the slightest 
bearing upon character, while the great con- 
cerns of the kingdom of heaven are utterly 
neglected. The questions about which the 



232 PHABISAISM. 

sects differ are mostly questions of this char- 
acter. They themselves are swift witnesses 
to the truth of this statement, for each of 
them is always making haste to declare that 
Christians of other names are all traveling in 
the same road and going to the same place. 
But what an infinite amount of fussing and 
puttering there is about these petty distinc- 
tions, which are not differences. Cannot 
these stalwart sectarians see that it is the 
leaven of the Pharisees that is working in 
all these foolish fermentations ? 

But the type of modern Pharisaism to 
which I wish chiefly to draw attention is of 
a much more dangerous description. It is 
that which grows out of the tendency to 
identify the religious life with certain set 
practices and observances, and to feel that 
one who is punctual in these is to be esteemed 
a saint, no matter what his real character 
may be. There are many good people 
among us who put so much emphasis upon 
the mere going through the motions of the 
worshiper and devotee, that they are un- 



PHARISAISM. 233 

able to take mucli interest in matters of 
every-day behavior. 

Another element sometimes complicates 
problems of this nature. If the man who is 
punctual in all the customary observances is 
also a liberal giver to churches and benev- 
olent causes, the case is practically closed 
in many minds. Such a man must be a 
good man. To question it is next door to 
blasphemy. 

I heard a good clergyman talking, not 
long ago, about a public character, whose 
conduct, as I happened to have abundant 
evidence, has been most perfidious, — a man 
whose greed has made him unscrupulous in 
pushing his fortunes ; who has trampled 
upon equity and justice and honor and all 
the rights of his neighbors. Of him the 
good clergyman warmly said : " Why, here 
is this man, against whom such horrible 
charges are made, and what do you think ? 
I found out the other day that this man is a 
devoted Christian ; he always goes to church, 
and to prayer-meeting; he has family 



234 PHABISAISM, 

prayers, and he asks a blessing at the table 
at every meal." That, in the clergyman's 
judgment, seemed to be conclusive evidence 
that the accused person was a good man, — 
anybody who did all those pious things must 
be a good man. He did not say that the ex- 
tortions and crimes of which the other was 
charged were all balanced and offset by this 
fidelity to the minor religious obligations ; 
of course, he would not say just that : but it 
was evident that, in view of this man's ex- 
emplary observances, the clergyman's mind 
was practically sealed against any evidence 
that could incriminate him. And this was 
because, all unconsciously, no doubt, he had 
come to put so much weight on mere observ- 
ances that the great tests of character were 
obscured. 

^" There is another man," the clergyman 
went on, " about whom stories of the same 
kind have been told. But this man, as I 
have been told, has built an elegant church 
and parsonage, and has presented it to the 
Presbyterian society with which he wor- 



X. 



ONE BUT TWAIN. 




Polarity, or action and reaction, we meet in every part 
of nature : in darkness and light ; in heat and cold ; in 
the ebb and flow of waters ; in male and female ; in the 
inspiration and expiration of plants and animals ; in the 
equation of quantity and quality in the fluids of the hu- 
man body ; in the systole and diastole of the heart ; in 
the undulations of fluids and of sound ; in the centrifugal 
and centripetal gravity ; in electricity, galvanism, and 
chemical affinity. Superinduce magnetism at one end of 
a needle : the opposite magnetism takes place at the 
other end. — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essay on Com- 
pensation. 

The system of nature is a balance of antagonistic forces. 
This relation of the forces is not a restful equilibrium, but 
a fluctuating and compensating one, like that of the wave- 
rocked sea. It is an equilibrium of action and reaction 
which, in their more complicated forms, become great 
cycles of movement, coextensive with the entire field of 
nature and history. . . . At the bottom of the mental 
scale there is reflex action, and at the top mental action 
is counteraction. There is no mental conception of 
properties except by contrast ; one feeling antagonizes 
another ; the mind is itself a system of balances, often 
fluctuating from one extreme to another, and the will is 
forever the theatre of emotional conflict. And all this 
antagonism is not incidental and transitory as usually 
supposed, but fundamental and ineradicable. — Reforms : 
Their Difficulties and Possibilities ^ page 1. 



ONE BUT TWAIN. 255 

his earthly affairs, and his humanity must 
vitalize his faith. 

*' For pleasant is this flesh ; 

Our soul, in its rose-mesh 
Pulled ever to the earth, still yearns for rest ; 

Would we some prize might hold 

To match those manifold 
Possessions of the brute, — gain most, as we did best ! 

" Let us not always say, 
' Spite of this flesh to-day 
I strove, made head, gained ground upon the whole ! ' 
As the bird wings and sings. 
Let us cry, ' All good things 
Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps 
soul!'" 

We find these balancings of diverse or 
opposing tendencies in every department of 
thought and life. Not only in the elements 
and factors of existence, but in the social 
forces, this law is discovered. It is a very 
old remark that harmonious and healthful 
social conditions are the result of the com- 
bination of two opposing tendencies, — the 
disposition to make changes, and the disposi- 
tion to resist changes. A society in which 



256 ONE BUT TWAIN. 

there are no conservatives has no stability, 
and a society in which there are no liberals 
has no movement. The determination to 
preserve the status quo^ and the determina- 
tion to revolutionize the status quo^ are 
always present in the most vigorous commu- 
nities ; and the welfare of the state depends 
on their being pretty fairly balanced. The 
conservatives always contemn the radicals, 
and count them the enemies of the common- 
wealth ; and the radicals always hate the 
conservatives, and deem them the foes of 
progress ; but each is the proper foil of the 
the other, and the country would go to ruin 
speedily if either of these tendencies should 
be greatly weakened. 

In our own political history we have gen- 
erally found two contrasted policies arrayed 
against each other, in whose equilibrium the 
strength of our government is found. These 
are the policy of the centralization of 
power and the policy of the diffusion of 
power. There must be strength in the gen- 
eral government ; much authority must be 



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'KlYAil ins 3[K0 fqz 



234 PHARISAISM. 

prayers, and he asks a blessing at the table 
at every meal." That, in the clergyman's 
judgment, seemed to be conclusive evidence 
that the accused person was a good man, — 
anybody who did all those pious things must 
be a good man. He did not say that the ex- 
tortions and crimes of which the other was 
charged were all balanced and offset by this 
fidelity to the minor religious obligations ; 
of course, he would not say just that : but it 
was evident that, in view of this man's ex- 
emplary observances, the clergyman's mind 
was practically sealed against any evidence 
that could incriminate him. And this was 
because, all unconsciously, no doubt, he had 
come to put so much weight on mere observ- 
ances that the great tests of character were 
obscured. 

*-" There is another man," the clergyman 
went on, " about whom stories of the same 
kind have been told. But this man, as I 
have been told, has built an elegant church 
and parsonage, and has presented it to the 
Presbyterian society with which he wor- 



PHARISAISM. 235 

ships." " But suppose," said a listener, 
*' that those train robbers who, after murder- 
ing the express messenger not far from here 
the other night, secured one hundred thou- 
sand dollars, had come to you, red-handed 
from their raid, and had offered you ten 
thousand dollars for your church, would you 
have given them a certificate of Christian 
character ? " The question would have been 
impertinent if it had not been pertinent. 
But what shall we say of the state of mind 
which can parry grave and well-founded 
charges of moral delinquency with assertions 
of pietistic virtue and with testimonies con- 
cerning gifts to churches ? Is there not 
great danger, in many quarters, of putting 
much more stress upon these practices than 
upon doing justly, loving mercy, and walk- 
ing humbly before God ? 

There is reason to fear that a good many 
of us clergymen are quite too much disposed 
to make men very comfortable who punctu- 
ally go through with the motions of religion, 
especially if they are liberal contributors. 



236 PHARISAISM, 

The state of mind is illustrated by the reply 
of that good pastor who was asked by a no- 
toriously wicked but wealthy man, v/hether 
a liberal gift of money to the church would 
improve his chances of heaven. The good 
clergyman scratched his head for a moment, 
when a bright thought struck him : '' It 's 
worth trying," he said. The shrewd humor 
of the parson must not obscure the fact that 
his policy is rather too common. The man 
who will give to churches or colleges or theo- 
logical seminaries large sums of money is 
likely to get a great deal of notice and of 
praise, even if his wealth has been gained 
by methods utterly nefarious. 

A few years ago, a religious newspaper, 
with great boldness, attacked certain repre- 
sentatives of a strong commercial insti- 
tution, accusing them of having not only 
overpowered their rivals by utter unscrupu- 
lousness, but also of having tampered with 
legislatures and courts. Another newspaper 
of the same denomination replied to this with 
much warmth. Did it undertake to disprove 



FHAEISAISM. 237 

the accusation ? No ; that could not be 
done. But it pronounced these men " Chris- 
tian men of the highest excellence of char- 
acter," declared that they were "eminent" 
members of its denomination, and that they 
" honored their religious obligations and con- 
tributed without stint to the noblest Chris- 
tian and philanthropic objects." In view of 
this fact, any mere unscrupulousness in busi- 
ness, or any trifling attempts to corrupt 
courts or legislatures, or to aggrandize them- 
selves by perjury or violence, were not, of 
course, to be spoken of. The other journal 
refused to be extinguished by this retort, 
and went on to quote Milton's answer to the 
similar plea made for King Charles : " For 
his private virtues they are beside the ques- 
tion. If he oppress and extort all day, shall 
he be held blameless because he prayeth at 
night and morning? " 

This is a question upon which, as it seems 
to me, there is need of much searching of 
heart on the part of ministers of churches 
and presidents of colleges and theological 



238 PHARISAISM. 

seminaries, and indeed on the part of the 
community at large. The disposition is 
strong in many quarters to condone the most 
monstrous iniquities, — iniquities that strike 
at the vitals of the nation, — if the men who 
commit them will put on a cloak of religious 
observance, especially if the cloak has good 
capacious pockets, out of which liberal dona- 
tions of hush-money are handed over now 
and then. Men who would certainly be in 
the penitentiary if they had their deserts are 
flattered and petted by the heads of great 
educational and religious institutions, and 
made to feel that they are regarded as the 
salt of the earth. 

Is a church really benefited with money 
that it gets in this way, by confounding 
moral distinctions, and giving to great mal- 
efactors the honor that is due only to the 
upright? Is a college better equipped for 
its proper work with endowments which it 
secures by paying honor to pirates ? I must 
be permitted to doubt it. And it seems to 
me that a college president who had the 



PHARISAISM. 239 

courage to say to any man who offered him 
large money which had been notoriously 
gotten by fraud and rapine : " Certainly, we 
will take your money, if you choose to give 
it to us ; but you must give it with the dis- 
tinct understanding that we shall teach our 
young men that it is a shameful thing to 
get wealth in the way that you have gotten 
yours, and that giving a part of it away in 
charity does not take off the curse," — any 
college president, I say, who was brave 
enough to say this, and stand by it, would 
earn for his college an endowment in Chris- 
tian manliness worth far more to it than 
the tainted millions which it failed to gain. 

What must be the effect upon young men 
in college of a policy displayed before them 
in the administration of the college, which 
exalts and honors rich plunderers for the 
sake of getting some of their booty? Are 
not young men educated by such spectacles 
in a more subtle and effective manner than 
by any sermons that are preached to them, 
or any instruction in theoretical ethics that 



240 PHARISAISM. 

they receive ? Is it not these things that 
fix their standards and form their ideals? 
And are they well educated under such in- 
fluences ? Would they not be better educated 
in an institution with fewer laboratories, 
smaller libraries, homelier halls, wherein 
the modern Pharisee, who devours widows' 
houses, and for a pretense makes long 
prayers, is treated as Christ treated his tribe, 
no matter how princely his donations to 
learning and to charity ? 

For it is not difficult to discern that this 
type, which is all too common amongst us, 
is essentially Pharisaic. If the Lord, whom 
in our prayers we seek, should suddenly 
come to his temple, these are the men upon 
whom would fall his withering curse, — the 
men who by greed and extortion and injus- 
tice have heaped to themselves great riches, 
and are using some small portions of them 
to purchase for themselves the flattery of 
those who instruct our youth, and the adu- 
lation of those who minister at our altars. 

And if those to whom this insincere hom- 



PHARISAISM, 241 

age is paid are Pharisees, what shall we say 
of those who bestow it ? It is natural that 
the malefactor should be willing to bribe the 
witnesses for God to be silent concerning 
his crimes, and to give him honor and dis- 
tinction instead of the shame and ignominy 
which are his due ; but how about the men 
who take the bribe ? Must there not be a 
terrible lack of moral perspective in the mind 
that can condone great crimes because the 
criminal goes through with the motions of 
piety, and is ready to bestow in charity a 
portion of his plunder? What has caused 
this lack of moral perspective? It is the 
fruit of a kind of religionism which puts 
emphasis on trifles and slurs over the eter- 
nal verities : which tithes mint, anise, and 
cummin, and neglects judgment, mercy, and 
faith. Clearly, there is need, even yet, of 
the great Master's warning : '' Beware of the 
leaven of the Pharisees." 



X. 



ONE BUT TWAIN. 



Polarity, or action and reaction, we meet in every part 
of nature : in darkness and light ; in heat and cold ; in 
the ebb and flow of waters ; in male and female ; in the 
inspiration and expiration of plants and animals ; in the 
equation of quantity and quality in the fluids of the hu- 
man body ; in the systole and diastole of the heart ; in 
the undulations of fluids and of sound ; in the centrifugal 
and centripetal gravity ; in electricity, galvanism, and 
chemical affinity. Superinduce magnetism at one end of 
a needle : the opposite magnetism takes place at the 
other end. — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essay on Com- 
pensation. 

The system of nature is a balance of antagonistic forces. 
This relation of the forces is not a restful equilibrium, but 
a fluctuating and compensating one, like that of the wave- 
rocked sea. It is an equilibrium of action and reaction 
which, in their more complicated forms, become great 
cycles of movement, coextensive with the entire field of 
nature and history. . . . At the bottom of the mental 
scale there is reflex action, and at the top mental action 
is counteraction. There is no mental conception of 
properties except by contrast ; one feeling antagonizes 
another ; the mind is itself a system of balances, often 
fluctuating from one extreme to another, and the will is 
forever the theatre of emotional conflict. And all this 
antagonism is not incidental and transitory as usually 
supposed, but fundamental and ineradicable. — Beforms : 
Their Difficulties and Possibilities , page 1. 



ONE BUT TWAIN. 253 

plifies a complicated story to leave about 
half of tlie truth untold. It often simplifies 
a difficult problem to ignore a moiety of the 
facts. But those truths untold, those facts 
ignored, are sure to come back and plague 
you. The idealist thinks that his theory of 
the universe is much more intelligible if he 
resolves all the phenomena of sensation into 
mental processes ; and the materialist thinks 
that he gets rid of many mental and moral 
difficulties by denying the separate existence 
of the soul. But each must practically as- 
sume the existence of the facts that he logi- 
cally denies, or he will behave in the one 
case like a lunatic, and in the other like a 
knave. 

It would seem, then, that experience vin- 
dicates an interpretation of the universe 
which recognizes the existence of both mind 
and matter, of th3 spiritual as well as of the 
material realm, and seeks to define their re- 
lation. That is often a very difficult task ; 
the border-lands in which mind and matter 
come together are regions of great obscu- 



254 ONE BUT TWAIN. 

rity ; it is often difficult to draw the line be- 
tween the two realms ; they shade into each 
other by degrees that are absolutely imper- 
ceptible by any powers that we possess ; 
nevertheless, the boundary is there, and om- 
niscience can trace it. There is a realm of 
spiritual powers, and there is a realm of ma- 
terial forces, and the phenomena of intelli- 
gent and conscious life lie partly in the one 
realm and partly in the other. Man is a 
spirit, and man has a body ; the body is as 
real as the spirit, and the spirit is as real 
as the body. Every man is the incarnation 
of a spiritual existence in a material form. 
The relation of these two he can never fully 
understand ; there are mysteries here which 
no insight can penetrate, no dialectics dis- 
solve ; but the fact is clear enough to most 
people of common sense. Neither side of 
this dual personality is to be ignored or de- 
spised ; the hands must minister to the needs 
of the spirit ; the conscience and the love 
must rule and transfigure the functions of 
the body. A man's religion must permeate 



ONE BUT TWAIN, 255 

his earthly affairs, and his humanity must 
vitalize his faith. 

*' For pleasant is this flesh ; 

Our soul, in its rose-mesh 
Pulled ever to the earth, still yearns for rest ; 

Would we some prize might hold 

To match those manifold 
Possessions of the brute, — gain most, as we did best ! 

" Let us not always say, 
' Spite of this flesh to-day 
I strove, made head, gained ground upon the whole ! ' 
As the bird wings and sings. 
Let us cry, ' All good things 
Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps 
soul ! ' " 

We find these balancings of diverse or 
opposing tendencies in every department of 
thought and life. Not only in the elements 
and factors of existence, but in the social 
forces, this law is discovered. It is a very 
old remark that harmonious and healthful 
social conditions are the result of the com- 
bination of two opposing tendencies, — the 
disposition to make changes, and the disposi- 
tion to resist changes. A society in which 



256 ONE BUT TWAIN. 

there are no conservatives has no stability, 
and a society in which there are no liberals 
has no movement. The determination to 
preserve the status quo^ and the determina- 
tion to revolutionize the status quo^ are 
always present in the most vigorous commu- 
nities ; and the welfare of the state depends 
on their being pretty fairly balanced. The 
conservatives always contemn the radicals, 
and count them the enemies of the common- 
wealth ; and the radicals always hate the 
conservatives, and deem them the foes of 
progress ; but each is the proper foil of the 
the other, and tlie country would go to ruin 
speedily if either of these tendencies should 
be greatly weakened. 

In our own political history we have gen- 
erally found two contrasted policies arrayed 
against each other, in whose equilibrium the 
strength of our government is found. These 
are the policy of the centralization of 
power and the policy of the diffusion of 
power. There must be strength in the gen- 
eral government ; much authority must be 



ONE BUT TWAIN, 257 

given to Congress and to the national execu- 
tive ; the lack of that was what made the 
old confederation a rope of sand, and led to 
the adoption of the present Constitution : at 
the same time, it is absolutely essential that 
as many as possible of the interests of life 
be committed directly to the people ; that 
the principle of local self-government be 
carefully cherished ; that the people of each 
state and of each local community be per- 
mitted to manage their own local affairs in 
their own way. Thus we have the two poli- 
cies of centralization and diffusion always 
confronting each other. Some statesmen, 
like Hamilton and Washington, see the de- 
fects of a weak central power very clearly, 
and urge the strengthening of the national 
government ; others, like Jefferson and Pat- 
rick Henry, are impressed by the evils of 
centralized authority, and urge a wide dif- 
fusion of power. Both are right. The path 
of wisdom for the nation is the middle 
course. The safety and peace of the com- 
monwealth is not found in canceling either 



258 ONE BUT TWAIN. 

of these forces, but in strengthening both 
of them, and in holding the balance evenly 
between them. 

In morals we find the same phenomenon. 
The foundation of Christian morality, as set 
forth in the command of Christ, '^ Thou shalt 
love thy neighbor as thyself," coordinates 
two principles, — self-love and benevolence, 
— what the philosophers call egoism and al- 
truism. Thou shalt love thyself and thou 
shalt love thy neighbor, and these two loves 
shall be equal ; this is the substance of the 
Christian law. It is often supposed that 
Christianity forbids the love of self and 
requires an absolute self-abnegation, which 
may even involve the loss of one's own soul. 
The old Hopkinsian theology taught that 
one must be willing to be damned, in order 
that he might be saved. But this is not 
Christianity. That recognizes as of absolute 
worth every human soul, and enjoins upon 
every man to estimate his own manhood at 
the price which was paid for its redemption. 
T^^^'^use I am a child of God, made in his 



ONE BUT TWAIN. 259 

image, I must highly value myself ; I must 
hold my own manhood in honor ; I must seek, 
in every lawful way, to develop its powers, 
to enlarge its capacities of knowledge and of 
happiness ; to make it what God meant it to 
be. The love of self is therefore a funda- 
mental obligation. But every other man is 
also a child of God, made in the same image, 
fitted for the same great services, the same 
ennobling joys ; and I must value the man- 
hood of every other man as I value my own ; I 
must not seek my own welfare or happiness 
at the expense of any other man ; I must 
cherish the welfare and the happiness of 
every other man as I cherish my own ; I 
must love my neighbor as I love myself. 
Now the true morality does coordinate these 
two principles of self-love and benevolence. 
Neither of them has, or can have, in the heart 
of the perfectly moral man, any precedence 
over the other. The negation of either of 
them is the denial of morality. 

Of course, there is a great deal of theoriz- 
ing about morals, which does deny one or the 



260 ONE BUT TWAIN. 

other of them. The prevailing utilitarian- 
ism assumes that all virtue reduces to self- 
love ; that right action is that which gives 
us greatest pleasure. Many modern philos- 
ophers unhesitatingly declare that egoism is 
the superior motive ; that my personal wel- 
fare or happiness is the supreme consider- 
ation ; and that though I may, in various re- 
finements of egoism, come to act sometimes 
very much as if my motives were disinter- 
ested, yet that the deepest spring of all my 
conduct must always be self-love. For myself, 
I do not believe that this is morality at all ; 
nor that any man with whom agreeable feel- 
ing or individual welfare is the dominant 
motive is a moral man, or knows what mo- 
rality means. And it is not difficult to see 
that in proportion as this philosophy pre- 
vails, the very foundations of morality are 
undermined, and the flood-gates of vice and 
dissoluteness are flung open. 

Nor is there, on the other hand, any sure 
basis for morality in the doctrine that makes 
altruism the sole and supreme principle of 



ONE BUT TWAIN, 261 

action, that enjoins a self-denial which ig- 
nores personal integrity and personal welfare. 
The outcome of that theory can be nothing 
but fanaticism. Sound morality rests exactly 
where Christ placed it, on the equivalence 
of self-love and benevolence. These two 
principles must be coordinated ; you cannot 
ignore either of them ; you cannot subordi- 
nate either of them ; you must hold them 
firmly together as the twin foundations of 
morality. 

There is still another aspect of moral 
science in which we see the same duality of 
motive. When the question is raised re- 
specting the factors of character, we hear 
two replies. There are those who say that 
circumstances make the man ; there are those 
who contend that the man's character is due 
to his personal force or weakness, and that 
circumstances have no control over character. 
Materialistic evolutionism regards the en- 
vironment as responsible for nearly every- 
thing; some schools of theological ethics 
practically ignore the environment, and lay 



262 ONE BUT TWAIN. 

the whole responsibility upon individual 
choice. The truth is, that the two agencies 
are all the while at work; that due account 
must be taken of both ; that it is very shal- 
low and one-sided philosophy which neglects 
or depreciates either of them. Yet a good 
share of the disputes about social reform that 
are always filling the air arise from the fact 
that some persons see one side of this ques- 
tion very clearly and refuse to see the other ; 
and about an equal number are equally 
perverse in their determination to stand and 
look on the opposite side of the shield. 

The social troubles that are constantly 
burdening our hearts, — the want and des- 
titution among the working people, — what 
is the cause of them? It is the fault of 
the political or the industrial system, say 
some reformers. It is unjust and burden- 
some taxation ; it is a bad organization 
of labor ; we must revolutionize the whole 
social and political order ; we must abolish 
the tariff ; we must levy all our taxes on the 
land ; we must nationalize all capital ; it is 



ONE BUT TWAIN, 263 

the environment that is at fault, we must 
change that ; that is the only remedy. No, 
say another class, the government is all 
right ; taxation is fair enough ; the industrial 
organization is the best possible ; the trouble 
is with the working people themselves ; 
they are lazy, shiftless, wasteful, unreason- 
able ; if they would work for such wages as 
they can get and save what they earn, there 
would be little poverty. Which is right? 
Both are right, and both are wrong. Gov- 
ernment is at fault ; taxation is inequita- 
ble ; the industrial system, as based wholly 
on competition, is fundamentally defective. 
On the other side, many working people are 
lazy and inefficient and wasteful and im- 
practical ; a large share of their miseries do 
come from this source. Yet capitalists, as 
a class, will see nothing but the faults of the 
laborers ; and labor reformers and socialists, 
as a class, will see nothing but the faults of 
the present regime. The well-to-do classes 
are inclined to insist that nothing shall be 
done until the laborers mend their ways ; 



264 ONE BUT TWAIN. 

and the labor reformers and the socialists 
sometimes tell the workingman that he is a 
fool if he tries to improve his condition by 
being more industrious and more econom- 
ical ; that there is no cure except a radical 
reconstruction of society. And because of 
this stupid and half -idiotic, one-sided view of 
both parties, progress toward the ameliora- 
tion of the social order is very slow. The 
environment does need mending, and so do 
the men ; those of us who have something 
to do with the making of laws and the or- 
ganization of industries are bound to do 
what we can to improve the environment ; 
until we do that we have no right to scold 
the laboring man for his improvidence and 
inefficiency. The laboring man, on the other 
hand, is bound to correct his own faults ; 
until he does, his outcries against the un- 
toward circumstances will make but little 
impression. 

In the temperance reform the same phe- 
nomenon confronts us. The prevailing tem- 
perance sentiment of the period puts the em- 



ONE BUT TWAIN, 265 

phasis upon the environment ; it is the envi- 
ronment that needs reforming, and not the 
men ; we must remove temptation ; we must 
shut up the saloons ; that is the only cure 
for intemperance. This is the cry of the 
typical temperance man of the period. Over 
against him stand an army of men who 
declare that the environment has little or 
nothing to do with the case ; that the only 
temperance reform that is of any value is the 
reformation of the habits of individuals ; 
that when men stop drinking the saloon will 
be closed for want of patronage, and that 
that is the only way in which they ever will 
be closed. Now the truth is, that both these 
methods are necessary, and that they are 
equally necessary. We are bound to do 
what we can to improve the environment, to 
remove temptation ; just as fast as it can be 
done, we are to shut up the saloons, and re- 
duce the area of temptation ; for the sake of 
the weaker members of society, who lack the 
moral stamina to resist temptation, these pre- 
ventive measures must be» resorted to. So- 



266 ONE BUT TWAIN, 

ciety has a perfect right thus to protect itself 
against an acknowledged evil. No man's 
personal liberty to buy liquor on every street 
corner can be defended, when it is proved 
that the maintenance of this liberty involves 
the deterioration of public morality, and the 
imposing of a heavy burden of taxation upon 
honest industries. But this right and duty 
to deal sharply with the saloon power should 
never be urged (as it generally is urged) in 
such a way as to imply that the men who 
yield to existing temptations are practically 
guiltless; that so long as the saloons are 
open no man can be greatly blamed for mak- 
ing a beast of himself by the use of strong 
drink. I think that the general tone of 
temperance discussion at the present day is 
utterly mischievous, because it does make 
just this impression, that the saloon is wholly 
responsible for the drunkenness of the period, 
and that the men who patronize the saloons 
are not responsible at all. 

Passing to another phase of the temper- 
ance question, thore are those who insist that 



ONE BUT TWAIN, 267 

drunkenness is a disease, and that it is not a 
sin ; there are those who insist that it is a 
sin, and that it is not a disease. Both are 
wrong in what they deny, and right in what 
they affirm. It is a sin, and it is also, in 
many cases, a disease. Medical treatment 
is often necessary, and moral stimulus and 
restraint are equally necessary. The drunk- 
ard's disordered stomach and nerves must be 
treated therapeutically, and his enfeebled 
will and dulled conscience and damaged self- 
respect must be treated ethically. Any treat- 
ment which despises either of these methods 
is quackery. 

Even insanity is now by the wisest alien- 
ists subjected to vigorous moral treatment, 
especially in its earlier stages. The doctors 
have found out that there are two sides to a 
man, and that when he is diseased it is folly 
and nonsense to expend all the effort upon 
one side of him and neglect the other. They 
put much emphasis upon the rousing of the 
patient's will, the strengthening of his self- 
control, the exercise of the rational and men- 
tal power which he still possesses. 



268 ONE BUT TWAIN. 

It is undoubtedly true that the tendency 
has been very strong in modern medicine to 
neglect the spiritual and moral nature, to 
make no account whatever of this hemisphere 
of human life ; and this has led to the oppo- 
site extravagances of mind-cure and Chris- 
tian science, and all that sort of thing, which, 
under one name or another, is all the while 
prevailing. But the mind-curers, on their 
part, are just as one-sided as the people over 
against them, who forget that man has a 
mind ; both sides of the man must be studied 
and wisely ministered unto ; it is ridiculous 
to suppose that you can cure all mental dis- 
orders with drugs and dietings, and equally 
ridiculous to suppose that you can cure all 
bodily disorders by thinking that they are 
cured, or praying that they may be. 

These illustrations sufficiently set forth 
the principle under consideration. Those 
who consider them will be constrained to ad- 
mit that many questions have two sides, and 
that those who wish to understand such 
questions must be willing to take a fair look 
at both sides. 



ONE BUT TWAIN. 269 

The kind of dualism here suggested does 
not set one portion of the universe over 
against another in an irreconcilable conflict ; 
it is only a diversity that is revealed in the 
progress toward unity. The " self " and the 
" not-self " are elementary and contrasted 
terms of thought ; but the unity of the two 
is the presupposition of all thinking. So 
these contrasted phases of life are no irredu- 
cible antagonisms ; each is essential to the 
integrity of the other ; both are included in 
a higher unity. But every truly sane man 
must be able to comprehend this fact, that 
human progress is largely due to forces that 
limit and check each other, and thus, by 
their reactions, strengthen and support each 
other. 



XI. 

RULING IDEAS. 



The Divine End, or final cause of all things, is the 
consummate and perfect life, of which Christ is the type. 
But this Divine Life is not an end outside the process of 
its development. It is immanent in the whole process, 
as the quickening and organizing principle of the whole. 
It is at once the end or consummation and the instru- 
mental cause of the whole movement. . . . What we see 
in Christ is the Divine Life that has ever been immanent 
in the world, ever unfolding itself toward its perfect 
glory, as both the instrumental and the final cause of all 
things. — I. M. Whiton, Gloria Patri, page 59. 

[The New Theology] holds that every man must live 
a life of his own, build himself up into a full personal- 
ity, and give an account of himself to God : but it also 
recognizes the blessed truth that man's life lies in its re- 
lations ; that it is a derived and shared life ; that it is car- 
ried on and perfected under laws of heredity and of the 
family and the nation ; that while he is " himself alone," 
he is also a son, a parent, a citizen, and an inseparable 
part of the human race. ... It turns our attention to 
the corporate life of man here in the world, — an indi- 
vidual life, indeed, but springing from common roots, fed 
by a common life, watched over by one Father, inspired by 
one Spirit, and growing to one end ; no man, no genera- 
tion, being " made perfect " by itself. Hence its ethical 
emphasis; hence its recognition of the nation and of 
the family, and of social and commercial life, as fields 
of the manifestation of God and of the operation of the 
Spirit ; hence its readiness to ally itself with all move- 
ments for bettering the condition of mankind, — holding 
that human society itself is to be redeemed, and that the 
world itself, in its corporate capacity, is being reconciled 
to God ; hence, also, an apparently secular tone, which 
is, however, but a widening of the field of the divine and 
spiritual. — Theodore T. Hunger, The Freedom of 
Faith, page 25. 



XI. 

RULING IDEAS. 

The arguments and illustrations of the 
preceding chapters rest upon certain funda- 
mental ideas which have been more or less 
clearly indicated from time to time, but 
which it may be well to bring together in 
the closing chapter. 

The first is that doctrine of the imma- 
nence of the Christ, which was specially re- 
ferred to in the fourth chapter. This great 
doctrine is clearly brought out in Paul's 
later epistles : the Epistle to the Ephe- 
sians, so called, and the Epistle to the Co- 
lossians. It is significant, as concerning 
the method of revelation, that this profound 
view of the Incarnation was not reached 
by the great Apostle until near the end of 
his ministry. To a vision purified by long 
fellowship with the Spirit and by the good 
discipline of trial this truth was vouchsafed. 



274 RULING IDEAS. 

Paul might not have been fitted, when he 
wrote his first letter to the Thessalonians, 
for the dispensation of this mystery. And 
even as the truth was one of the latest com- 
municated to Paul, so it has been one of the 
latest to be received by the church. Indeed, 
it may be doubted whether the church could, 
before this generation, have made much use 
of this doctrine. The law of continuity is 
involved in it, and the application of this 
law to the physical order has but recently 
been naturalized in the popular conception. 
Men had to be made familiar with the idea 
of an orderly progress in creation, before 
they could get much benefit from the con- 
ception of Christianity as a normative germ 
or force planted in the very heart of the 
creation, and working itself out in the slow 
processes of history. The idea is not yet 
by any means familiar, yet flashes of its 
illuminating light are seen here and there in 
the dusk of time, pointing out the direction 
in which progress lies.^ 

1 It is a striking" fact that to a few of the Greek 
Fathers, to Clement of Alexandria especially, this truth 
was clearly made known. 



RULING IDEAS, 275 

I have spoken of the idea as Pauline ; but 
the author of the Fourth Gospel tells us 
that the Word was in the beginning with 
God, and that all things were made through 
Him ; that apart from Him nothing was 
made. This means that those attributes of 
God which are revealed to the world in 
Christ were the molds in which the whole 
creation was shaped ; that Christliness is the 
channel through which the creative energy 
of God has poured itseK out from the begin- 
ning. This is the '' mystery," the " stew- 
ardship " of which so pressed upon the spirit 
of the Apostle Paul, and which he so ear- 
nestly strove, in the epistles to the Ephe- 
sians and the Colossians, to " bring to 
light ; " — " the mystery which from all ages 
hath been hid in God who created all 
things ; " and the gospel, as he conceived of 
it, was proclaimed " to the intent that now 
unto the principalities and the powers in the 
heavenly places might be made known 
through the church the manifold wisdom of 
God according to the eternal purpose which 



276 RULING IDEAS. 

he purposed in Christ Jesus our Lord." 
The eternal purpose, which was realized in 
Christ, is thus immediately connected with 
the act of creation ; and even '' before the 
foundation of the world," as the Apostle 
says in another place, this purpose looked 
forward " unto a dispensation of the fullness 
of the times, to sum up all things in Christ, 
the things in the heavens and the things 
upon the earth." All this is made even 
more explicit in that passage of the Epistle 
to the Colossians, where Paul declares that 
Christ is " the first-born of all creation ; for 
in Him were all things created^ in the heav- 
ens and upon the earth, things visible and 
things invisible, whether thrones or domin- 
ions or principalities or powers ; all things 
have been created through Him, and unto 
Him ; and He is before all things, and in 
Him all things consist." Not only the phy- 
sical creation, but the social order also, finds 
its raison d^etre in the Christ. Thrones and 
dominions, as well as genera and species, are 
explained by Him. The law of the spirit of 



RULING IDEAS. 277 

life in Christ Jesus is the law of the uni- 
verse. It is the unity which springs from 
love, not less than the unity which is the 
postulate of reason, that makes it a universe. 
It would be difficult to frame statements 
in which this great truth of the immanence 
of Christ in the very structure of the nat- 
ural world and of the social world could 
be more definitely set forth than it is here 
set forth by the Apostle Paul ; and it 
would be quite as difficult to conceive of 
any truth of revelation more momentous. 
Surely, it puts a new face upon nature, and 
gives us a wholly new conception of life and 
duty. The whole world is transfigured by 
the conception. To find the very attributes 
of God which are manifested in Christ incor- 
porated into the order of creation, and slowly 
unveiling themselves to the sight of men ; 
to learn, by the study of life upon this 
planet, that love, in the forms of sympathy 
and self-sacrifice, are parts of His ways by 
whom the worlds were made, — is to get a 
new view of the meaning of life. 



278 RULING IDEAS. 

It is true that tlie doctrine of the imma- 
nence of God has become quite famihar in 
recent years. Since the day of Benedict 
Spinoza, the carpenter theory of creation 
has been greatly discredited, and the pres- 
ence of God in his world has been generally 
admitted. The fear of pantheism has not 
been permitted to dig an impassable chasm 
between the Creator and the creation. That 
"series of antitheses between the universe 
and God, in time, in space, in causation, in 
excellence," of which Dr. Martineau speaks, 
the tendency of which, as he says, " is to 
overshadow the world by the contrast of a 
transcendent glory, and to depress it with 
a conscious insignificance," is no longer the 
habit of Christian thought. That ancient 
deism is a waning philosophy. And all 
that the same writer has to say about this 
old conception is worth heeding : " The 
sense of ephemeral life, of overwhelming 
law, of hurrying death, of twilight know- 
ledge, and only fancied power, settles upon 
the heart of such a faith, and drives it upon 



RULING IDEAS. 279 

artifices of self-relief. The provinces of the 
natural and the supernatural are sharply 
marked off from one another, in date, in 
seat, in agency : the former belonging to 
second causes, to the cosmic interlude, and 
the scene of physical existence ; the latter to 
the action of the First Cause, before, after, 
and outside the regular ordering of the 
world ; so that the supernatural can never 
be human, and the natural, except in its 
first institution, can never be divine. In 
short, the legislating mind of the universe 
and its executive media are kept separate 
from each other ; the one an imperative 
prefix that ' spake and it was done ; ' the 
others, constant servitors, engaged with 
purely ministerial functions unconsciously 
performed. What is present with us and 
around us is only mechanism, running down 
through its appointed term; and for any 
such freshly moving will as is needed for 
personal relations, we must look, in one di- 
rection, further than the dawn of geologic 
time, and, in the other, to the ' unseen uni- 



280 RULING IDEAS. 

verse,' beyond the equalization of heat and 
the death of all things in this." ^ This con- 
ception answers none of the purposes of re- 
ligion ; we must have a God to worship and 
to trust in who is nearer at hand than this ; 
and therefore, without going over into the 
other extreme of pantheism, the faith of the 
Christian church has been hopefully feel- 
ing after that God whom Paul preached to 
the Athenians, in whom we live and move 
and have our being. The tendency of 
thought of which Wordsworth was the great 
exponent has taken possession of the Chris- 
tian consciousness ; and the truth that na- 
ture is to us the constant revelation of the 
presence and power of God is beginning to 
be a reality. 

Nevertheless, the revelation of God in 
nature has been accepted as only partial. 
Nature, it has been supposed, makes known 
to us God as law. His power, his wisdom, 
perhaps, also, to some extent, his benevo- 
lence may be inferred from the things that 
1 A Study of Religion^ ii. 144. 



RULING IDEAS. 281 

are made ; but the deeper truths of the In- 
carnation and the Redemption are not, as we 
have been taught, even suggested to us in 
nature. Indeed, Christianity, as a system, 
has been assumed to be whoUy separate from 
the natural order, and even set over against 
it in contrast ; nature and grace are anti- 
thetical terms. 

To one who holds this view of the Chris- 
tian system, the doctrine of the immanence 
of the Christ must come with something of 
a shock. No doubt, it will require the re- 
consideration and the reversal of some of his 
stock notions ; and those to whom the sum- 
mons " Change your minds " is unwelcome, 
will not entertain it. But it is an important 
question, after all, whether this doctrine, so 
clearly taught by Paul and John, is not the 
very deepest truth of the Bible ; whether it 
is not the fundamental fact of creation and 
of revelation ; and if it is, the effort to ad- 
just to it our conceptions of life and duty 
cannot be regarded as too onerous. We 
have a great deal to do with this world in 



282 RULING IDEAS. 

which we live ; it is the school in which our 
characters are trained, and everything de- 
pends upon our learning its primary lessons. 
If the truth of which Jesus the Christ is the 
manifestation did not first appear in the 
world about nineteen hundred years ago ; or 
if it was not first adumbrated in certain rit- 
ual observances prescribed a few centuries 
earlier ; if, on the contrary, it was the very 
theme of the song of the morning stars when 
they sang together ; if it begins to find its 
expression in the lowest orders of living 
creatures ; if the rudiments of love and self- 
sacrifice, — the elements of Christliness, — 
are among the primordial tendencies of 
nature ; and if these principles have been 
steadily developing since the beginning of 
creation, so that what was first a mere un- 
conscious tendency has emerged into an 
ethical law, — then our religion has a footing 
and a sanction in this world which the world 
has not hitherto confessed. If all this is so, 
then what new and large meaning is given 
to the thought of Christ as one who comes, 



RULIJSfG IDEAS. 283 

not to destroy but to fulfill the law, and to 
bring life as well as immortality to light. 
It is the law of life that he fulfills and illu- 
minates. If this is so, all life is sacramen- 
tal and revelatory ; " the struggle for the 
life of others," which appears in the lowest 
tribes, is the proof that in the Christ of Cal- 
vary all things consist and become intelligi- 
ble. If this is so, then He through whom 
all things were made " came to his own " in 
a deeper sense than we have given to the 
words, when He stood among us, pointing 
to the fowls of the air and considering the 
lilies. 

" To look reverently at the face of nature 
is to look into the face of Christ. We see 
his lineaments as through a veil, but He is 
there. By the mystery of his human birth 
and ours we know that He has been, nay, 
that He ^s, in this vast, visible, unfolding of 
invisible being, with us, — spirit revealed 
through form. 

" There is a conscious being somewhere 
behind every unconscious manifestation of 



284 RULING IDEAS. 

life, or it could never have existed at all. We 
call it the working of a spirit. What spirit ? 
Is there any other source of life than the one 
spirit, — God ? Is there more than one 
God, — He who is known to us as Father, 
Son, and Spirit, — the One Life ? And can 
we divide his nature, and say that by this 
part of himself He gives this kind of life, 
and by that, another ? Has He no human 
interest in the place He has prepared for 
his human family, even though it be only 
their temporary residence ? " 

" No ; we shall never understand nature, 
except in a manner entirely superficial, until 
we look into her spirit with spiritual eyes, 
like Christ's, — the only true human vision. 
For the habitation of man, as well as his 
form, is shaped by the Spirit and planned 
by the Father and the Son from the begin- 
ning. ' By whom He made all worlds.' ' All 
things were made through Him, and apart 
from Him was not anything made that was 
made."'i 

1 The Unseen Friend, by Lucy Larcom, pp. 159, 160. 



RULING IDEAS. 285 

Another of the truths assumed in the 
foregoing chapters is the truth that the re- 
lations of men to one another in society are 
not contractual, but vital and organic ; that 
we are members one of another; that no 
man reaches perfection or happiness apart 
from his fellow-men ; that no man liveth to 
himself, and none dieth to himself. This con- 
ception of the organic unity of society has 
been more or less familiar ; indeed, it could 
hardly be ignored by those who had Paul's 
epistles in their hands : but the assumption 
of interpreters has been that these figures 
of Paul represented the society of the regen- 
erate, — the organized church ; and that no 
such relations were to be looked for outside 
the ecclesiastical pale. By this limitation 
the whole force of the idea has been dissi- 
pated. If these vital relations subsist only 
between those who have passed through some 
transcendental experience, and are no part 
of the common heritage of humanity, man- 
kind in general will not be able to take any 
deep interest in them. 



286 EVLING IDEAS. 

It ought to be remembered, however, by 
interpreters who insist on giving these anal- 
ogies of Paul a purely ecclesiastical refer- 
ence, that Paul was describing the Chris- 
tian society rather than any mere ecclesias- 
ticism ; and that, in Paul's conception, the 
Christian society was destined to become 
universal ; the day was coming when every 
knee should bow and every tongue confess 
that Christ was Lord. And the relations 
thus established would be the normal rela- 
tions among men. If men as Christians were 
to become members one of another, it was 
only because as men they were made to be 
members one of another. This manner of 
living together was not something imported 
into humanity by Christ ; it was only the 
realization, by his grace, of the ideal of hu- 
manity. For even as the Christian is not 
something other than the perfect type of 
humanity, but the restoration of that type, 
so the Christian society is nothing other 
than the perfect human society, the society 
which unf alien and sinless human beings 
would spontaneously form. 



RULING IDEAS. 287 

To limit Paul's figure of the body with 
many members to the church is, therefore, 
grievously to belittle a great truth. Christ 
is the head of the church, but lie is also 
the head of humanity ; and the true rela- 
tion of every human being to the race is that 
of the member to the body. To every man, 
whether within or without the church, this 
truth needs to be brought home. No man 
comprehends life until he is made to see by 
how many organic filaments he is bound to 
his fellows ; how utterly impossible it is for 
him to separate his interests and his fortunes 
from theirs ; in how many ways the welfare 
of those who are round about him depends 
upon the working, in due measure, of that 
part of the organism which he is. 

" Wondrous, truly," cries Herr Teufels- 
droeckh, " are the bonds that unite us one 
and all ; whether by the soft binding of 
Love or the iron chain of Necessity, as we 
like to choose it. More than once have I 
said to myself of some perhaps whimsically 
strutting Figure, such as provokes whimsical 



288 RULING IDEAS. 

thoughts, ' Wert thou, my little Brotherkin, 
suddenly covered up within the largest im- 
aginable Glass bell, — what a thing it were, 
not for thyself only, but for the world ! 
Post Letters, more or fewer, from all the 
four winds, impinge upon thy Glass walls, 
but must drop unread ; neither from within 
comes there question or response into any 
post-bag ; thy Thoughts fall into no friendly 
ear or heart, thy Manufacture into no pur- 
chasing hand ; thou art no longer a circu- 
lating venous-arterial Heart, that, taking 
and giving, circulatest through all Space 
and all Time ; there has a Hole fallen out 
in the immeasurable universal World- tissue, 
which must be darned up again.' Such ve- 
nous-arterial circulation of Letters, verbal 
Messages, paper and other Packages, going 
out from him and coming in, a blood circu- 
lation, visible to the eye ; but the finer ner- 
vous circulation, by which all things, the 
minutest that he does, minutely influence all 
men, and the very look of his face blesses or 
curses whomso it lights on, and so generates 



RULING IDEAS, 289 

ever new blessing or new cursing, — all this 
you cannot see but only imagine." ^ 

One more ruling idea, wbich the preced- 
ing chapters imply, is the presence of the 
kingdom of God. That this kingdom is to 
come in larger measure, with wider dominion 
and more pervasive control, is the faith and 
the prayer of every true disciple ; but it is 
also his assurance that the kingdom is here ; 
that all its essential forces are now in active 
operation ; that righteousness and peace 
and joy in the Holy Ghost are not to be 
awaited, because they have come, with all 
their blessed influences, to dwell among us ; 
that the love which is the fulfilling of the 
law is just as truly regnant in the world 
to-day as it ever will be in heaven ; not so 
widely regnant, indeed, but not less truly. 
The reality is here ; its completion is yet to 
come. Few lives are yet wholly under its in- 
fluence ; few homes are completely ruled by 
its pure precept ; few institutions perfectly 
1 Sartor Resartus, Book III. ch. vii. 



290 EULING IDEAS. 

obey its royal law : yet its benign sway is 
felt, in some degree, in innumerable places ; 
its pervasive force, like the leaven, is at 
work everywhere ; it is as silent as light, 
as subtle as life, and mightier than either. 
The thought of the world is gradually being 
freed from superstition and prejudice ; the 
social sentiments are being purified ; the 
customs are slowly changing for the better ; 
the laws are gradually shaped by finer con- 
ceptions of justice. There are reactions and 
disasters, but taking the ages together the 
progress is sure. God is in his world ; He 
has never yet departed from it, nor can we 
conceive of Him as withdrawing, for one 
moment, his presence or his control. He is 
not in haste. A thousand years in his sight 
are but as yesterday when it is past, and 
as a watch in the night. As the husband- 
man waiteth for the precious fruit of the 
earth, being patient over it, so the Eternal 
waiteth for the reaping of his great pur- 
poses. But his days go on, and his designs 
fail not. 



BULING IDEAS, 291 

" The slow, sweet hours that bring us all things good, 
The slow, sad hours that bring us all things ill, 
And all good things from evil ' ' 

are the servitors of his throne. And his vic- 
torious love is steadily leading on the gen- 
erations to that far-off divine event which 
our strongest faith but imperfectly discerns. 
The presence in the world of mighty forces 
of evil, of principalities and powers of dark- 
ness, is not to be gainsaid : but the kingdom 
does not belong to them ; it never did, and 
it never will. The kingdom of the world is 
become the kingdom of our Lord and of his 
Christ, and He shall reign for ever and ever. 
The conception of this kingdom of God 
as something future — as a reign yet to be 
set up on the earth — has been derived 
from an extremely literalistic reading of 
those glowing texts that describe the great 
accessions of power which are yet to come, 
from time to time, to the empire of our 
King. One can easily believe that there 
are to be, perhaps in days not distant, mar- 
velous forward movements of the forces of the 



292 RULING IDEAS. 

kinpfdom. The social conditions seem even 
now to be preparing for a revelation to the 
world of the glory of Christ, which shall be 
overpowering in its splendor, — like the 
lightning which cometh forth from the east 
and is seen even unto the west. But these 
great manifestations of his royalty will be 
only the fuller unfolding of truths which are 
here in the world to-day. A few men in the 
world believe that the law of love is the law 
of all life, and that nothing else will give us 
peace and prosperity. Suppose that, as the 
result of social struggles and overturnings, 
this truth should be so enforced upon the 
minds of the great multitude of employers 
and employed that they could not doubt it ; 
and suppose that there should be a world- 
wide movement to substitute goodwill for 
greed as the organizing principle of indus- 
trial society : such an event as that might be 
described as the coming of Christ to the 
world with power and great glory ; none of 
the apoealyptic emblems would overstate its 
dramatic significance. And yet it would be 



RULING IDEAS, 293 

simply the wider acceptance, by the world, 
of a law which is now recognized and estab- 
lished among men. 

The point to be noted is that the king- 
dom is here, a kingdom still increasing ; 
and that the coming which we pray for can 
be nothing more than the fuller develop- 
ment and manifestation of the blessed life 
which now, in so many places, and by so 
many heavenly ministries, is making the 
earth beautiful and glad. 

How, now, must our personal conceptions 
of life and duty be affected by. the appre- 
hension of these great truths ? It must be 
evident, in a moment, that the Christian dis- 
ciple, to whom the relation of Christ to the 
world is only that of an architect ; to whom 
the relations of men to one another in soci- 
ety are those of voluntary contract ; and to 
whom the coming of the kingdom of heaven 
is a wholly future event, to follow the de- 
struction of the present social order, — must 
have a very different conception of personal 



294 RULING IDEAS. 

life and duty from that wliich is entertained 
by one who finds in the life of the world 
about him the revelation of the love of 
Christ ; who feels that, without any choice 
of his own, every human being is vitally re- 
lated to him, and who knows that the king- 
dom of heaven, a silently growing but irre- 
sistible dominion, is here in the world to-day. 
The immanence of Christ, the vital unity of 
the race, the presence of the kingdom, — 
these truths give to life a new sacredness, 
and to duty new cogency. The artificiality 
and formalism with which the old concep- 
tions were invested give place to natural- 
ness and reality. Christianity is no longer 
anti-natural ; it is in the deepest sense nat- 
ural. We may claim that its profoundest 
laws, including its law of sacrifice, may 
be inductively verified. We are not fol- 
lowing cunningly devised fables when we 
proclaim the truth as it is in Jesus ; we are 
laying hold upon the everlasting verities. 
Humanity is the crown of the creation, 
and Christ is the head of humanity. The 



RULING IDEAS. 295 

man Christ Jesus completes and explains 
the revelation that began with the begin- 
ning of the creation. We stand on solid 
ground to proclaim the gospel of his grace. 
"Nature," says one, "is ever the counter- 
part of our Lord. The temporal hath no 
strife with the eternal. Like the union of 
soul and body is the union of the heavenly 
with the earthly, of the endless life of the 
kingdom with our mortal life. It is only 
as our Lord reviveth in our hearts the 
spiritual meanings of nature and of the 
kingdom that we have the full revelation 
of the Father ; and, abiding in Him as 
He abideth in the Father, we have, even 
in this earthly existence, everlasting life, 
being associated with Him in cooperation 
with the eternal purposes of an infinite 
love." 1 

The doctrine of the immanence of the 
Christ makes the old distinction between the 
sacred and the secular meaningless and al- 
most blasphemous. All life is sacred. What 
1 God in His World, p. 177. 



296 RULING IDEAS. 

God hath cleansed by the indwelling Word, 
that call not thou common or unclean. 

Nor can we allow Mr. Kidd's contention 
that the Christian morality is ultra-rational. 
It is only to a philosophy which is semi-ra- 
tional that it bears any such look. Take in 
all the facts, and the Christian altruism is 
scientifically verified. The morality of strife 
is based upon an incomplete induction. If 
the race is one body with many members, 
if there is but one life and one law, that 
law must be love. To one who admits 
the organic unity of the human race, the 
notion that Christ's law is ultra-rational is 
absurd. It is and must be the law of the 
organism. It is the simple scientific expres- 
sion of the relation of the members to the 
body. The bond that unites us to our fel- 
lows is, therefore, one that we cannot sun- 
der. To sever ourselves from our kind is 
self-mutilation. This is not some counsel of 
perfection for saints ; it is the fundamental 
fact of life. All our industry, all our social 
organization, must conform to it. No man 



RULING IDEAS. 297 

livetli unto himself. Our daily work is a 
social function. Wealth is valueless and 
impossible apart from human fellowship. 
Not to keep this steadily before us in our 
administration of all our affairs is to be 
false to the primary human obligation. To 
set up natural law in the social world or 
the business world, as distinct from and 
contrary to the Christian law, is not only 
unmoral, it is unscientific. Love is the 
fulfilling of all law. And not only do these 
ideas make our life sacred and love our 
daily regimen, they ought to fill us also 
with confidence and courage. The kingdom 
that we pray for and fight for is not a mere 
hope, it is a solid reality. When we say 
that we are working together with God, we 
know what we mean. We can discern his 
working, and can be confident that we are 
helping in the fulfillment of his great de- 
signs. The signs of his presence and power 
are everywhere. The victories that He has 
won over the powers of darkness and cruelty 
and greed are more than we can number. 



298 RULING IDEAS, 

The social philosopher, scanning the tenden- 
cies which he finds in history, declares that 
" it is possible to follow through the centu- 
ries the progress of a revolution unequaled 
in magnitude and absolutely unique in char- 
a<}ter, a revolution the significance of which 
is perceived to lie not, as is so often sup- 
posed, in its tendency to bring about a con- 
dition of society in which the laws of previ- 
ous development are to be suspended, but 
in the fact that it constitutes the last orderly 
stage in the same cosmic process which has 
been in the world from the beginning of 
life." ^ This mighty movement, the same 
philosopher tells us, is identified with the 
Christian religion. It is the kingdom of 
heaven which Christ proclaimed, into which 
is gathered the harvest of the centuries, and 
by which the kingdoms of this world are be- 
ing subdued to righteousness. To those 
who have intelligently allied themselves with 
this kingdom, and are seeking its righteous- 
ness, doubt is an absurdity and fear a sole- 
1 Social Evolution, p. 148. 



RULING IDEAS. 299 

cism. Repulses and disasters can seem to 
them but temporary reverses ; the future is 
secure. They strive not nor cry ; they haste 
not nor rest ; for the eternal God is their 
dwelling-place, and imderneath them are the 
everlasting arms. 



QBoofe^ Of iReltgton. 



Lyman Abbott. 

The Evolution of Christianity. i6mo, gilt top, 

^1.25. 

He is always thoughtful, devout, and logical. — London Spectator. 

A. V. G. Allen. 

The Continuity of Christian Thought. A Study 
of Modern Theology in the Light of its History. New 
Edition, with a new Preface and a full Index. i2mo, 
gilt top, $2.00. 

A work from the very depths of Christian thought. ... A singularly noble book. 
— Christian Union (New York). 

Religious Progress. i6mo, ^i.oo. 

A delightful little volume, highly suggestive, very readable. — The Independent 
(New York). 

American Religious Leaders. 

Biographies of Men who have had great influence 
on Religious Thought and Life in the United States, 
Each volume, uniform, i6mo, gilt top, $1.25. 

Jonathan Edwards. By Prof. A. V. G. Allen. 

Wilbur Fisk. By Prof. George Prentice. 

Dr. Muhlenberg. By Rev. W. W. Newton. 

Francis Wayland. By Prof. James O. Murray. 

Charles G. Finney. By Prof. G. Frederick Wright. 

Mark Hopkins. By Pres. Franklin Carter. 

Henry Boynton Smith. By Prof. L. F. Stearns. 

They will be of immense service, not only to ministers and Sunday-school teach- 
ers, but to men of affairs, to all thoughtful women, and to the young whose opin- 
ions are just forming and who ought to know how the leading thinkers of this coun- 
try have contributed of their efforts to make the popular conception of religion what 
it is to-day. — Boston Beacon. 

Andover Review, Editors of. 

Progressive Orthodoxy. A Contribution to the 
Christian Interpretation of Christian Doctrines. i6mo, 

$1.00. 



BOOKS OF RELIGION, 



The Divinity of Jesus Christ. An Exposition of 
the Belief of the Christian Church in its Origin and Rea- 
sonableness. i6mo, $1.00. 

The Bible. 

The Riverside Parallel Bible. Containing the 
Old and New Testaments, both the Authorized Version 
and the Revised Version, in parallel columns. Quarto, 
1742 pages, $5.00; Persian, $10.00; full morocco, $15.00. 

James Freeman Clarke. 

Ten Great Religions. Part I. An Essay in Com- 
parative Theology. With an Index. Crown 8vo, gilt 
top, $2.00; half calf, $3.25. 

Ten Great Religions. Part II. Comparison of 
all Religions. Crown 8vo, gilt top, $2.00 ; half calf, 
$3-25. 

Common-Sense in Religion. i2mo, $2.00. 

Events and Epochs in Religious History. With 
20 Portraits, Plans, and Views. i2mo, ^2.00. 

The Ideas of the Apostle Paul. Translated into 
their Modern Equivalents. i2mo, $1.50. 

Every-Day Religion. i2mo, $1.50. 

Memorial and Biographical Sketches. Including 
Governor Andrew, Charles Sumner, Dr. Channing, Theo- 
dore Parker, Dr. Howe, Dr. Gannett, Dr. Susan Dimock, 
and others. i2mo, $2.00. 
The following estimates of one of Dr. Clarke's books are 
equally true of all : — 

His rare learning, clear style, and the systematic conciseness with which he 
abridges a vast amount of material are apparent to every one. — Bibliotheca Sacra. 
Every page is full of interest. — Christian Life (London). 

John H. Denison. 

Christ's Idea of the Supernatural. Crown 8vo, 

$2.00. 

A contribution to the solution of great problems, — mate- 
rial phenomena, psychic phenomena, and spiritual experience 



BOOKS OF RELIGION. 



George A. Gordon. 

The Witness to Immortality in Literature, Phi- 
losophy, and Life, izmo, $1.50. 

It deals with one of the most grand and solemn themes in a masterly and truly 
helpful manner. — The Congregationalist (Boston). 

The Christ of To-Day. Crown 8vo, ^1.50. 

A book of vigorous thought, strong conviction, and noble 
persuasion. ' 

William Elliot Griffis. 

The Lily among Thorns. A Study of the Bib- 
lical Drama entitled The Song of Songs. i6mo, $1.25; 
in white cloth, gilt top, $1.50. 

Dr. Griffis's analysis of the whole drama is wonderfully interesting. — Boston 
Beacon. 

Arthur Sherburne Hardy. 

Joseph Hardy Neesima. With Portraits of Mr. 
Neesima and Alpheus Hardy. Crown 8vo, $2.00. 

The story is one of the most remarkable in Christian annals. — Christian Union 
(New York). 

Samuel E. Herrick. 

Some Heretics of Yesterday. Crown 8vo, $1.50. 

Admirable Sketches of Tauler and the Mystics, 
Wiclif, Hus, Savonarola, Latimer, Cranmer, Melanchthon, 
Knox, Calvin, Coligny, William Brewster, Wesley. 

Thomas Hughes. 

The Manliness of Christ. i6mo, gilt top, $1.00; 
paper, 25 cents. 

Thomas a Kempis. 

Of the Imitation of Christ. With decorative head 

and tail-pieces, initial letters, etc. i6mo, $1.50. 

Pocket Edition, With the same decorations 
i8mo, $1.00. 



BOOKS OF RELIGION, 



Elisha Mulford. 

The Republic of God : An Institute of Theology. 

8V0, $2.00. 

One of the great works in modern religious literature. 

Theodore T. Munger. 

The Appeal to Life. i6mo, gilt top, ^1.50. 

The Freedom of Faith. With Prefatory Essay 

on " The New Theology." i6mo, gilt top, $1.50. 

Lamps and Paths. New Edition, enlarged. i6mo, 
gilt top, $1.00. 

Each sermon is a beautiful little treatise in itself ; full of devout, earnest, power- 
ful thoughts expressed in a very felicitous and exquisite manner. — Literary World 
(London). 

J. A. W. Neander. 

General History of the Christian Religion and 
Church. Translated from the German by Rev. Joseph 
ToRREY, Professor in the University of Vermont. With 
an Index volume. 6 vols. 8vo, $20.00. The Index alone, 
$3-00- 

Dr. S chaff pronounced Neander the greatest church histo- 
rian of the nineteenth century. 

Leighton Parks. 

His Star in the East. A Study in the Early Aryan 
Rehgions. i2mo, gilt top, $1.50. 

The wide interest in Buddhism, and the vague impression of its relations to 
Christianity, make studies of this kind highly opportune. — The 1 7idepe7tde7it (New 
York). 

A. P. Peabody. 

King's Chapel Sermons. Crown 8vo, gilt top, 

$1.50. 

Josiah Royce. 

The Religious Aspect of Philosophy. i2mo, gilt 

top, $2.00. 

One of the most profound and best-reasoned books ever published in the United 
States. — Methodist Review. 
An important work. — La Revue Philosophiqne (Paris). 



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